Agenda Venezia

Alberto Gianquinto. Works 1960 -2001

 

It has been a competition between friends, relatives, aquaintances, appraisers and critics that made it possibile to reconstruct with plenty of works, at the Correr Museum in Venice, the artistic itinerariy of Alberto Gianquinto (1929 – 2003), from his beginning in the early Sixties up to 2001: the several paintings, some of big dimensions, and few sculptures exhibited are indeed all coming from private collections, and they are united to remember appropriately an artist who has been amongst the most representative of his generation in Venice. In this route some recurrences have been highlighted, both on a stilistic and ideological point of view. Gianquinto is the kind of artist that once would have been defined as committed: an example are the symbols of the red flag (triumphant or ragged) and of the hammer and sickle, or the homage to the “Che”, whose death he evokes in different occasions: “A Guevara” of 1969 and “Guevara “of 1986. Another recurrence, but of emotional kind, is the picture which he dedicates to his son every year for his birthday, “Nino mio ha XXI anni” of 1982 and “Nino mio ha XXXII anni” of 1993, two paintings which seem to catch the amazement for the time passing by. Then there are the stylistic elements which accompany his complete works. The candle, metaphore for the frailness of life in “La luna e le candele” (the moon and the candles) of 1983 or the similar theme of the rose or other cut flowers. In this there is a suble lyrism tinged with melancholy, which is specular but also interlaced with his political committment.

Gianquinto is also artist of a reality which, particularly in his first years, puts forward ordinary objects: tables, chairs, drawers, alone or to give evidence to the lonelyness of persons in poor interiors: the most effective synthesis is the one of the “Grande interno a Lipari” of 1960, the painting which first made him famous.

 His relationship with space is quite complicated: sometimes it is shaped as a cage, a claustrophobic element, particularly if expressed through sculture, or it can be metaphore for repression in paintings with a political subject; more often it is the window, union between inside and outside space, opening on the idyllic world of a garden dreamed of, or of a sunny beach in Jesolo, since 1983 regular residence of the artist. With time, colours of the paintings become more serene, taking pastel hues and the light blue of the spring sky crossed by swallows.

In the last years a new turn towards a prevailing religious theme, most of all in the “Crucifixion” cycle of 1994, where Gianquinto expresses, in a few essential outlines and with alternance of black and white, a thoughtful, dignified sorrow.

Open until 26 February. See museum’s opening hours.

Lidia Panzeri