PAOLA ANGELINI. Splendor Solis
1 October – 1 November 2021
Venezia, Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
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Selected in 2019 at Art Verona Fair for the Level 0 program, Paola Angelini was invited by Ca’ Pesaro for the 16th Italian Contemporary Art Day, promoted by the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums (AMACI).
Held on December 5th 2020 only online due to the Covid-19 emergency, the Contemporary Art Day was prepared by inviting the Italian painter to work in the collection. In October 2020 Paola Angelini had spent a few weeks in contact with the masterpieces of the Ca’ Pesaro Gallery, working directly in the collection during the closing days.
Silence and quietness have given her the opportunity to dialogue with the works, to steal the secrets of the Masters, to confront the lights and shadows of our History. The Museum’s project room reopens starting from Paola Angelini’s experience and her memories of the time she spent in Ca’ Pesaro.
The large Splendor Solis canvas is an ongoing work, a work in progress that the artist will conclude during the exhibition here in Venice. It is an homage by the artist to the Museum collections and a further testimony of the vitality of the Gallery, which since the early 1900s has hosted together with the masterpieces of the most important protagonists of international art also the productions of young and revolutionaries avant-garde.
«During the months of the pandemic, when the museum was closed to the public, I had the opportunity to work among the masterpieces of the 20th century that have always been part of my imagination. I have been painting in front of the masters not only to learn the secrets of their work, but above all to place the different influences in my mind in a more conscious way. What I did in these rooms was to observe, to read the works as if they were books open in front of me. I then went back to my studio and there I let decant what I had painted and studied. Thus was born a cycle of works consisting of 17 canvases, in which the memory of the Italian 20th century paintings is integrated and creates a dialogue with my personal memory, my subjects, my history. The “Splendor Solis” canvas, from which the idea for the Ca’ Pesaro project room takes its name, is part of this latest cycle of canvases. It is a work that I wanted to leave open, unfinished, a painting in progress that can accommodate different moments of thought, reflections and notes on figuration, composition and pictorial matter. I chose to continue it and conclude it in the museum, where this phase of study began. The project room becomes my studio for a few days, an intimate, isolated place for reflection, but open to the public and comparison. I will therefore be able to reflect on that specific painting, conclude a cycle of work that lasted more than a year and ask myself about the painter’s profession.»
Paola Angelini, September 2021
