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Galleria Blu
Via Senato 18, 20121 Milano
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Italy
Tel.++39 02 76022404
Fax++39 02 782398
Hours: Mon.-Fri. 9:30am-12:30pm, 4pm-7:30pm, Sat 4pm-7:30pm
Contact: Daniele Palazzoli
E-mail: galleriablu@tiscalinet.it
web www.galleriablu.com
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Giuseppe Santomaso
This exhibition, devoted to the work of Venetian Giuseppe Santomaso, strengthens the connection that existed between the artist and Galleria Blu for over twenty years. It was to Galleria Blu, in fact, that Santomaso gave exclusive access to his works from 1969 and, later, from 1984 until his death. The Milanese gallery now administers his creative output throughout the world.
The trusting nature of this relationship encouraged Santomaso, while still alive, to approve the compilation of a complete archive of his works. Galleria Blu continues the task to this day, keeping a watchful eye over his works and acting as a guardian of their public circulation.
Now, a few years after the last Santomaso exhibition, the gallery is showing a carefully compiled retrospective of the artist. Each room hosts masterpieces documenting the various key moments in his artistic career; a career based on the conviction that “with the end of “narrow” ideologies, with the revision of “faiths” incurred by the new social situation, art becomes man’s only lifeblood, able to respond to our need for depth...” In the same note, dated 1987, the artist specifies that art should be understood as “the vitality of the imaginary that soothes the lifeblood of being, in a season in which everything, even the concept of time itself, is open to debate...”
The pieces on show, which number around twenty, allow even those who have never seen Santomaso’s work before to appreciate their value, and also to understand their evolution. Perhaps most useful in this “reconstruction” of Santomaso’s creative history are the works that reference particular periods: for the ’50s Il muro del pescatore (1954) and his Tramonto della città industriale (1955), for the ’60s his Suite friulana n. 2 (1963) and his Omaggio al Crocifisso di Cimabue (1967), for the ’70s the Lettera a Palladio (1977), and for the last decade of his life Oltre il concetto executed in 1988 and shown at that year’s Venice Biennale. These works encapsulate Santomaso’s entire poetic; a poetic firmly rooted in his native city and in the traditions of the great Venetian masters, from whom he has evolved both his strength of coloring, but above all his masterful representation of light.
Born in Venice in 1907, Santomaso established himself as one of the maitres-à-penser of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti after the Second World War (1946). Soon, however, having abandoned social themes, he began to paint edgy abstracts and emotional figurative works. In 1952, he became a member of the Gruppo degli Otto (Afro, Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova), also defined by Lionello Venturi as the abstract-concretists. In 1954, he won the International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale. After the mid-’50s, he freed his work completely from form and content. His painting, however, did comply with the dramatic connotations of almost all other Arte Informale work, but always developed around carefully thought out structure, in the search for harmony and balance that was so characteristic of his art. During the course of the ’60s, Santomaso freed himself from even these faint links to Arte Informale and perfected an imagery of raw emotion, of spatial evocation, and of luminous vibrations whose apotheosis can be seen in works such as Omaggio al Crocifisso di Cimabue and Lettera a Palladio.
The catalogue that accompanies the show contains a wealth of historical documents, many of which have not previously been published, and color plates of all the works displayed in the exhibition.
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Santomaso - catalogue
2000
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