An exhibition dedicated to Claudio Verna opens at Cardi Gallery in Milan

An exhibition dedicated to Claudio Verna(Guardiagrele, 1937 ), one of the leading exponents of Pittura analitica or Pittura-Pittura, a movement born out of the need to bring painting back into vogue at the end of the 1960s, when it was believed to be an art form with no future. The exponents of this phenomenon explored and analyzed painting by focusing on its founding elements (space, form and color) and can be considered the Italian response to American Minimalism. FromHard-edge to Colour Field, many parallels can be glimpsed in Verna’s works with North American painting of the 1960s, particularly with figures such as Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland.

Curated by Piero Tomassoni, the exhibition will display both historical and recent works by the artist and follows an extensive retrospective held at the London venue earlier this year. Most of the works on display are large and range in size from 1967 to 2016, from which the use of white in Claudio Verna’s work can be seen. The artist has often been called a “master of color,” as color research has been the focus of his entire career of more than 50 years.For Verna, white is also never a neutral pigment or a symbol of empty space,but is the color that gathers in itself all the other shades, just as white light is composed of the entire spectrum of colors visible to the human eye, produced by the different wavelengths of light radiation.

The curator of the exhibition writes: "Verna’s ’monochrome’ paintings are never actually such;they always present a complex vibrant texture of juxtaposed, overlapping, interwoven colors. In the ’white paintings’ the hues emerge over time, both because of the chemical properties of the acrylic paint, with which Verna has been experimenting since the beginning, and because the diaphanous surfaces allow their iridescent backgrounds to shine through depending on the light and angle of observation, with results that are often surprising even to the artist himself. Equally, his ’black paintings,’ such as Aegizio ’78 featured in the exhibition, allow color to re-emerge from slits that open onto the chromatic layers of the deep space of the dark canvas. These kinds of works place the main emphasis on the visual implications of the format of the painting and the texture of the brushstroke, as well as light and shapes, sometimes geometric and sometimes dictated by a freer gesture. However, they remain an integral part of the artist’s research into the perception and interaction of colors, which continues to be the focus of his work, as well as a significant contribution to the history of abstract painting, in which Verna remains an active protagonist."

The exhibition will run from Sept. 18 to Dec. 20, 2018.
For all information you can call (+39) 02.45478189 or send an email to mail@cardigallery.com.

Pictured is a 1974 painting by Claudio Verna, acrylic on canvas, 100x140 cm. Photo by Bruno Bani.

An exhibition dedicated to Claudio Verna opens at Cardi Gallery in Milan

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