© Galleria d'Arte Maggiore G.A.M. | Pirro Cuniberti, Art Warehouse Zattere, Venezia
PIRRO CUNIBERTI
Dreamer of signs
Art Warehouse Zattere
Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47 - 30123 - Venice
opening 11 May 2017 - 6 pm
11 May - 30 September 2017
On the occasion of the 57. International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia and a year after the artist's passing, the exhibition conceived and promoted by Galleria d'Arte Maggiore G.A.M. in the spaces of Art Warehouse Zattere pays tribute to Pirro Cuniberti, a major figure in the Contemporary Italian Art. Imposing but discrete, the artist was able to assimilate the european outputs in order to create an original work in painting or, better, drawing. The exhibition, curated by Francesco Poli, satisfies in fact the choice that Poli made to give up on painting, so to dedicate his attention exclusively on works on paper, preferearing the small dimensioned ones. Therefore, the works exhibited are turned into the small pieces of a mosaic, composing Cuniberti's poetic and his own unique visual language. The catalogue edited by Silvana Editoriale is enriched by a critical contribution by Flaminio Gualdoni.
It is on the surface of the paper that Cuniberti develops, whith lightness and harmonic balance, his own imaginary alphabet, composed of all the basic elements of the pictorical language (such as the sign, the line, the point, but also letters and numbers). In this way, the artist creates his landscapes, still lives and free structures, all suspended between the world of imagination and memory, stories not forced to answer to a logical order, but that, instead, are illusive appearances, quickly captured in their manifestation, and so forever fixed on the paper by traces of graphite and shadows of colors. What crearly emerges from the exhibited works is the inspiration from Paul Klee, an artist that Cuniberti had been able to admire exactly at the Venice Biennale in 1948. "When I saw a Van Gogh I almost fainted, but then I saw Paul Klee's works and my feet were not touching the ground". Considering the great master's work, Cuniberti transforms the most geometric traits in a more fluid language, in an universe open to improvisation, in which we can also find the traces of his acute irony. The result is a kind of art charachterized by "hard signs, soft and faded signs, signs that enclose clear shapes, signs that allude, shelled signs, thrilling signs…" as the artist himself loved to define them.
Therefore, the aim of the exhibition is to create a path that runs towards an ironic, lyrical, magic "signs' land", where the artist walks lightly, showing us a fairytale landscape, a private and intimate world, a secret journey that becomes real thanks to his "precise and allusive" painting, as Francesco Arcangeli defined it. A restless research conducted by an artist defined "patient like an archaeologist, rigorous like a scientist, mysterious and fantastic like an alchemist".
