An exhibition on Matisse and the Mediterranean is scheduled in Mestre.

From Sept. 28, 2024, to March 4, 2025, the Candiani Cultural Center in Mestre will host the exhibition Matisse and the Light of the Mediterranean, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, Head of Ca’ Pesaro - International Gallery of Modern Art, and organized by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. The exhibition project conceived for the Candiani Cultural Center stems from the civic collections of modern art housed at Ca’ Pesaro, starting with the International Gallery of Modern Art’s valuable collections of graphic art, which boast three significant lithographs by Henri Matisse dating back to the 1920s and two drawings from his artistic production of 1947.

In the exhibition, the French artist becomes a kind of red thread in the history of 20th-century art, linking different authors who worked on the inner qualities of mimetic, optical and conceptual painting at the same time. Light and color are the focus of the entire exhibition, expressed in the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea and the arabesque lines of female figures. The importance and almost obsession with drawing in Matisse are here joined by reflections on the decorative, ornament, the arabesque line, and at the same time the “drawing of pleasure” of which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes. The master of the Fauves will thus be placed in dialogue with artists with whom he shared biographical events and artistic revolutions, such as Henri Manguin, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, and Pierre Bonnard. Expressionist freedom in the use of color and line was central to Matisse’s research as well as that of those artists who aimed to capture Mediterranean light in their painting. As Derain wrote in a letter to Vlaminck, they wanted to express a “golden light that eliminates shadows.”

A number of themes will be covered in the exhibition: from the friendship between Derain and Matisse, who traveled to the Mediterranean coast of France in the summer of 1905, to the centrality of certain places, such as Nice and Saint-Tropez, the latter of which has been assumed as an icon of 20th-century art and culture. The backdrop for these events is the French Mezzogiorno, a fundamental place for the evolution of modern European art. Geography of the soul and of artistic creation, the Mediterranean is the protagonist of color liberated from the wild expressionism of the Fauves to then enter the research on form that constitutes probably the most important artistic and moral legacy left by Matisse to new generations.

For info: https://muvemestre.visitmuve.it/

An exhibition on Matisse and the Mediterranean is scheduled in Mestre.

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