Italo Valenti

Italo Valenti
Its lyrical candour

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25th May – 8th July 2012

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Opening times: 10-13 / 14,30-18,30; on Saturday, on Sunday and on public holidays – closed on Monday.

The exhibition dedicated to Italo Valenti (1912-1995) answers to the purpose of reading the original structure of the body of the artist’s work: in fact, in the different phases of his production, which lasted for more than fifty years, Valenti established a rich system of brand new correspondences passing from the youthful figurations to the lyrical abstraction of his maturity.
The first chapter (1930-1950) refers to the years starting from his education at Brera’s Academy in Milan under Aldo Carpi, to the experience “Corrente”: Valenti’s painting is different for his skill of interpreting dreams and visions, fairy-tales painted according to Carpi’s inventive world. The paintings close to “Corrente” reflect lyrically the civil commitment linked to the representation of reality.
The second chapter, temporary and limited to 1950s, is linked to “chaos”, which is also the title of the group of cosmic imagines painted by the artist in the moment in which he leaves the intimate realism of his first pictures. Abstract painting show in an informal language this Valenti’s specific period, linked to Lucrezio’s poetics and represented in Biennali.
The third chapter, which is the most famous and which is linked to the lyrical abstraction, is divided in two moments – painting and collage – the languages that the artists meets during the period of Ascona (from 1960 to his death in 1995), where he works in close touch with Arp, Bissier, Magnelli e Nicholson.
This phase corresponds to the intensity of the highest poetics of Valenti’s work: unexpected, it shows a special symmetry with the motives of the Milanese period of his education, reused according to the geometrical solutions that renew the language.
The relationship between the youthful phase of the figuration and the mature one of the abstraction, the central presence of “chaos” and the final dialogue between the languages of painting and of collage are the forces that act in the whole Valenti’s work, symmetrical in the sure construction of correspondences between shape and colours. The exhibition, developed by Matteo Bianchi, is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Pagine d’Arte that goes further on into the poetics and the history of Italo Valenti’s art with the contributes of the developer, of Daniel Abadie, of Elena Pontiggia and of Luigi Cavadin, in addition to Bernard Blatter, Carlo Carena, Dante Isella and Giorgio Orelli’s accounts. The Mario Botta’s display has the purpose of giving to Valenti’s works – so deep both the small and the big one – the right legibility.