ANTONELLO VIOLA
L’oro della laguna

20 June – 28 September 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Dom Pérignon Rooms, II Floor

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni

Palmarola, Marettimo, Ponza, Vulcano, but also Murano and Giudecca: Antonello Viola’s works on glass, on which glazes of colour, erasures and transparencies are deposited over time, are inspired by islands, regions with changing boundaries and lit by the invariably iridescent reflections of light on water. In its engagement with the city of Venice, Viola’s work on glass embraces and continues that vibrant relationship between light, sky and water that has characterised the pictorial tradition of this city for centuries.

Here it is entrusted to the encounter of gold, turquoise and blue on a transparent and brittle support that enhances the qualities of the individual colours, the transitions from one to the other, their overlaps and the resonances between liquids. In parallel, but one might say contiguously, the artist structures space and time on a light, sensitive and delicate material: Japanese paper. Here, establishing new relationships, he structures space and time by adding or subtracting colour and metal, redefining boundaries and imagining open and closed surfaces and places, as on glass.

Landscapes made up of matter and masses create assonances and intuitions in Giulio Aristide Sartorio’s painting in the cycle Poema della vita umana displayed the rooms adjacent to the exhibition. The dialogue with painting and more generally the art history has always been a stimulus to creation for Viola. The result of the reworking, wearing away, cleaning and clotting of the pigments, papers and glass become devices that whisper and evoke the painting of the great Roman master, whose pictorial gesture is dried and compressed by Viola’s concentration of the material.

The shades of flesh and earth evoke incarnations and foundations, flows and interpenetrations, not as places of otherness, but as matter of transit, of permeation between the marine fluid and the “body” of the city. The fondamenta, the architectural and urban counterpart of Venice, which emerge and redesign the liquid dimension of the city, are recalled in Viola’s works by straight lines that appear on the surface of the colour, and then plunge back into the pictorial glazes. As if they were ancient borders now opened, these panels recall the eternal time of geometry and spirituality, the latter also reaffirmed by the skilful use of gold leaf.

The fondamenta are always related to the lagoon and constantly redefined by the tide; also participating in the interplay of reflections with the sky and the water, they help restore the unique and mobile portrait of Venice. In the same way, there is no fixed barrier to painting. In fact, in Antonello Viola’s works inspired by Venice, the freedom of the work is complete and it opens lyrically to the human gut and the mobility of fluids, entering the entrails of the city.

Admission to the exhibition from 20 June to 28 September 2025, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.