Home Shows In the matter of color


The exhibition activity starts again at the Dep Art Gallery, presenting In the Matter of Color, an all-Italian show with around twenty artworks by Natale Addamiano, Alberto Biasi, Pino Pinelli, Turi Simeti, open until the 4th July.

The project was born in 2018, designed for the two Whitestone's galleries in Taipei and Hong Kong, an exhibition thought to be an expression of the Italian post-war contemporary art, through different groups and movements. In the 2019 In the Matter of Color moved to Palazzo del Monferrato in Alessandria, and now it is back to where it was conceived.

Dep Art Gallery wants to restart after the Covid-19 emergency celebrating four artists who have been collaborating with the gallery for years (and someone even from its very beginning).

Red. White. Yellow. Blue. These are the colours that, through the different artistic experiences of diverse masters of Italian art, determine the pairing of works and dialogue among the artist in the exhibition curated by Matteo Galbiati.

Colour is the crucial theme that is developed, always in a different inclination, inspiration, and temperament, in the works of Natale Addamiano (1943), Alberto Biasi(1937), Pino Pinelli (1938), Turi Simeti (1929): artists who have never abandoned this identity and primary element in their practice.

The exhibition is a unique chance to watch and observe the relevance of their stories, that–without being completely consumed yet–are the best statement of a tradition that has its roots in the artists themselves, in order to determine–in the present day–the maximum value of an innovation that always looks to the future. Inside and behind the matter of colour.

Concrete and shattered, monochrome or vibrant, optic or evocative, thick or scattered, the chromatic material leads to four considerations that, across their own stories and intermingling the artistic-cultural events and happenings from the second-half of the 1900s, project their own reflection, and resulting aesthetics, into all of today's relevance, which is the sign of unwavering work that continues today and which has lots to tell and say.

Natale Addamiano's 'I cieli stellati', a series of works that represent the epicenter and horizon of his imaginary, describe his passion for a traditionally implicit and expressed painting, the herald of lyrical and profound romanticism, able to surpass the very limits of the landscape they try to pronounce. The poetry Addamiano repeats reinstates a pact of readability with the painting offered to the gaze of the viewer who, unaccustomed to the hype of certain art today, finds the power of imagination and evocation of painting that, without being academic, renews its own traditional pertinence.

Alberto Biasi's art story led him to be a key player of the 'New Trends' in Italian art in the context defined as Programmed Art. His work, in his sense, aims towards a close relationship with the viewer that in it reveals a process of active, dynamic, and renewed interaction in time and in the varying circumstances of sight. Perception and movement, alterations or changes, apparent or virtual, act like innovative elements that strive to acting upon the very structure of the work that constantly changes its physical and intuitive appeal.

A die-hard painter, Pino Pinelli is certainly one of the most coherent and authoritative masters of a kind of painting identified in the field of Analytic Painting. Right from the late 1970s his colour material was able to evolve into a concrete act, scattered and present in the environment, where the gesture and sign identify the artist's primary tensions. In his work what erupts to the extreme consequence is the act–grandiose, heroic, even almost desperate - of breaking and defeating the unity of the 'painting.'

The value of the painting of Turi Simeti–one of the artists present in the 1965 group show Zero Avantgarde in Lucio Fontana's studio in Milan–lies in having elected a primary element as a multiplying sign of his artistic act, safeguarding the identity of his own personal analytical intuition: the oval. The act of painting in him as well is defined as a concrete fact that leads the absolute silent monochrome layering of colours to encounter the value and sense of the object's physicality, not only intuited and conceptually approached, but experienced with the rhythm of the painting's very skin.