Rai5 celebrates the sea with two documentaries dedicated to Sorolla and Guccione

The sea is the protagonist of the new episode of Art Night to be aired on Friday, April 9, 2021 at 9 p.m.15 on Rai5: two documentaries dedicated to two painters far apart in time and space, Joaquin Sorolla (Valencia, 1863 - Madrid - 1923) and Piero Guccione (Scicli, 1935 - Modica, 2018), who will be introduced by Stefano Roffi, scientific director of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma).
The sea has always inspired painters and poets, who depicted and celebrated it in their artistic and literary works. The sea that invites travel, reflection and peace, which can be dark and tumultuous, but also blue and bright.

The evening will open with Joaquín Sorolla, Journeys of Light. The Spanish naturalist painter Joaquín Sorolla, who achieved his international recognition with the Grand Prix of the Universal Exhibition in 1900, consolidated an entirely personal style that brought him great popularity abroad. At a solo exhibition in London in 1908, he met the billionaire and patron of the arts, Archer Milton Huntington, who commissioned him to do the work of his life: the decorations of the Hispanic Society of America in New York. The enormous effort expended over eight years of travel, during which he produced up to fourteen large panels and a considerable number of sketches, affected his health. In 1920 he suffered a cervical hemorrhage, and three years later he died without being able to see his work exhibited in the Hispanic Society of America. After his death, his fame and work fell into oblivion, until 2009, when a retrospective exhibition was offered in Spain, in nine different cities and with over a million visitors. .

This will be followed by Nunzio Massimo Nifosì’s documentary, Piero Guccione, toward infinity. “I am a man who needs to look at the sea, with memory, to look at it having it there at a stone’s throw, as I had certainly looked at it as a child,” confided Piero Guccione in 1983 to Giorgio Soavi, one of the critics who were close to him and knew how to grasp the poetic message of his work. Acknowledged as one of the living masters of contemporary Italian painting, Guccione is among the very few who, like all the greats, have been able to make the main currents their own, from figurative to informal, without renouncing an ecstatic mystery, an enigmatic precision and the luminosity of forms that, in a completely different style, recall Hopper’s unmistakable atmosphere. The film, composed of researched shots mimicking the paintings and expert voices explaining their beauty, brings to the stage the coy personality and astonishing technique of an artist to be known in depth.

Art Night is a program by Silvia De Felice and Massimo Favia and Marta Santella. Directed by Andrea Montemaggiori.

Image: Joaquín Sorolla, The Bath Hour in Valencia, detail (1909; Madrid, Museo Sorolla)

Rai5 celebrates the sea with two documentaries dedicated to Sorolla and Guccione

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