Guido Strazza returns to his hometown of Santa Fiora with an exhibition and donation

Guido Strazza (Santa Fiora, 1922) returns to his hometown of Santa Fiora on the occasion of his birthday number 101. In fact, the artist is the protagonist of the exhibition È annuncio la cometa di luce nella notte, curated by Gianluca Murasecchi and Simona Ciofetta, hosted from December 23, 2023 to January 6, 2024 at Palazzo Sforza Cesarini. The opening will be Saturday, December 23 at 11:30 am.

The exhibition opens with a series of works from the 1950s to the present, tracing the main themes of the artist’s creative journey and his research on sign, the relationship of sign with light and color. A central moment of sacred reflection evokes the conception of a shining birth in this anthological exhibition of Guido Strazza’s works on paper, a theme that also accompanies a return to the author’s birthplace and, no less, a theme that prepares for the forthcoming birth of a museum venue in Santa Fiora, which will permanently house some sixty works donated by the artist to his birthplace.

Indeed, in November 2023 Guido Strazza donated paintings, drawings, and etchings, works representative of his artistic production from the 1940s to the first two decades of the 2000s, to his native municipality of Santa Fiora. The artist’s donation will be housed in the nascent Municipal Museum, in a section that will be dedicated to this important permanent exhibition, destined to become the museum of reference for his work. The collection, which traces the themes and cycles developed by the artist, constitutes a unique body of work summarizing his entire creative journey.

As for the exhibition, the selection of works is intended to represent a summary kaleidoscope of the cycles that determined the concatenated steps of his entire production, with a selection determined, for the occasion, to highlight creations in which supernatural and earthly nature are placed in joyful dialogue. The sampling is intended to be exhaustively representative of a thought that, while always moving from the central fulcrum of the sign, has branched out into subjects only seemingly transversal to each other but which a persistent and discernible thread has always knotted. Already from his earliest Aeropainting studies, his sign woven into continuous eddies and movements took root in a motive conception that has steadily blossomed from there on, from his journey to Latin America, a receptacle for works in which one senses the indeterminate suspension of the dimensions of time and space, perceivable as completely reversed in thesouthern hemisphere, to a dialogue that connected with the primitive graffiti known in Liguria, at the locality of the so-called Balzi Rossi, in 1958, in specimens that gesturally laced rocky immobility with the eternal mobility of transparencies and fluids. Gesture that dries up in the contemplation of the Dutch landscape, contemplation and pretext for a horizon line that summarizes a here and a there that is extensible to every sense of conception and vision. Sign that is energized in the Venetian sojourn and becomes reflective again in his return to Rome in the 1960s, specifically in the pictorial cycle The Garden of the Hesperides, a theme in which earthly existence is yearned for and an expression of intense happiness precisely in those delineations of the harvested paradisiacal fruits, contained in a sunny gaze untroubled by decay.

Also in the Ricercare cycle, the sign, the appearance of the conjunction of two or more chromatic fields, then becomes structure, as happens later in the Plots or Quadrangular Plots. Nature, observed by him, in its course of progression and adaptation, since the Latin American landscapes and up to the cycle of Insects or Trees, always pronounces a sequential constructive order in which the limitless variations are still a rational transition from one state to another with a connection of traces, of crystallizations or storms of gestures, of signification of an imprint brought to determine itself in a specified direction or in its opposite.

But also the nature of the sedimented urbanity of Rome, its Walls and Columns or the happy geometrization of metaphysical elaborations such as those found in the polychrome semiprecious stones of the Cosmati masters are concertedly tuned between instinctiveness, immediacy and the objective and spontaneous layering of history. The shift to the theme of theArch, which had already emerged in the early 1980s and then developed entirely in the late 1990s, is a synthesis of the form of the bridge, a sign of aerial conjunction between two absolute terms at the antipodes, in a gesture that is broad and fluid or neurotic and interrupted, a demonstration of an unbroken incessant in a philosophical binding of minimal or cosmic, peripheral or central energies that reconnect in turn, as, for example, happens with the circularities central of the Cosmatesque distributions with the propulsions of light, internalized or externalized, present in the Auras, in which the sign, only apparently, disappears to reform itself in the observant and enchanted retinas, a system that had already been introduced in the exact regularities of the Ricercare cycle but which here finds an original and universal axiom. Cards, all of them, that embrace almost the entirety of an extraordinary century experienced by the artist, born by fate and now reborn by choice in that of Santa Fiora.

The exhibition, with free admission, is open daily from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2:30 to 6 p.m. Closed Dec. 25.

Biographical notes.

Born in Santa Fiora on December 21, 1922, Guido Strazza began his artistic activity at a very young age after meeting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1942 invited him to participate in the Aeropittura exhibitions, at Palazzo Braschi in Rome and at the Venice Biennale. After graduating in engineering in Rome in 1946, he gave up his profession after two years to devote himself to painting. He traveled to Chile, Brazil and Peru where he developed a broad interest in pre-Inca art. In Rio de Janeiro, in Fayga Ostrower’s studio he began practicing printmaking; in 1951 and 1953 he exhibited at the São Paulo Art Biennial. He returned to Italy in 1954 and opened a studio in Venice. In Milan from 1957 to 1963, he made Signic Tales, long paintings on roll and studies on Metamorphoses of Forms, on themes developed in a series of pictorial cycles, such as Landscape in 1956, Balzi Rossi in 1958 and Dutch Landscape in 1961. Returning to Rome, between 1964 and 1967 he worked on the cycle The Garden of the Hesperides and attended the workshop of the Calcografia Nazionale where he deepened the language of engraving; he presented the results of his research in a solo room at the 1968 Venice Biennale. In 1979 Scheiwiller published his book Il gesto e il segno; at Palazzo Reale in Milan he exhibited the series Trama quadrangolare. Other cycles of painting and engraving followed, such as Ricercare, Dutch Horizons, Insects, Signs of Rome, Cosmati, Euclid’s Garden, Aure, Horizons, and Arches.

In 1984 he again had a solo room at the Venice Biennale. Exhibitions in the following years include the anthological exhibition at the Calcografia Nazionale in 1990, those at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano in 1999, at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza in 2005, and the large anthological exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 2017. He is passionately dedicated to teaching and also teaches at the National Chalcography, Wesleyan University, the University of Siena, the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, of which he was director in 1985-88, and the Free School of Graphics in Matera. His works are held at the British Museum in London, the Ludwig in Cologne, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi, the Mart in Rovereto, the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, among others, which acquired his archive. He receives various awards, including: the Feltrinelli Prize of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1988 for graphic art and in 2003 for engraving, the Cultori di Roma Prize in 2002, and the Vittorio De Sica Prize for visual arts in 2014. He is a member of the Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België, the National Institute of Roman Studies, and the National Academy of St. Luke, which he chaired in 2011-12. In 2020 in Rome, the ICCD dedicated to him the exhibition “Il segno e la luce. Guido Strazza through images from his archive.” In 2022 he was the guest of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for the donation of 500 of his chalcographic prints, included in the prestigious Corsini Fund; in the same year the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome celebrated his 100th birthday with an anthological exhibition, which was followed by a retrospective at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, the exhibition “Ricercare” at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the exhibition “Trame e Segni. Guido Strazza” at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 2023. In the same year, as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, his 1992 painting “Grande Aura,” part of an important donation by the artist included in the Collection, was exhibited in the Vatican Pinacoteca.

Guido Strazza returns to his hometown of Santa Fiora with an exhibition and donation

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