Bologna, at OTTO Gallery the exhibition Tetrahedron by Vera Portatadino

After the group show Tetrahedron (2021), with the exhibition Something Filled Up My Heart With Nothing Vera Portatadino (Varese, 1984) opens her first solo show at OTTO Gallery in Bologna, until Jan. 21. Citing in the title the incipit of the song Wake Up by the Canadian band Arcade Fire, Vera suggests the disenchanted atmosphere that permeates her most recent work, full of reflections and ecological concerns.

Viewing the concepts of figuration and abstraction as ineffective categories applied to her work, Vera Portatadino situates her practice in the realm of anti-narrative. Her paintings evoke instead of illustrate, suggest instead of explain, allowing the grammar of painting to become itself an object of study.

“Vera Portatadino’s present pictorial work,” writes critic Sofia Silva, “stands on a parataxis that I call Byzantine. Each painting is a tabula that on an imaginative level can be replaced by the area of a rudimentary weaving loom. The layers of paint, i.e., the threads of the composition, are pulled one by one by Vera, some longitudinally, others transversally, just as in the basting of warp and weft. What seems only a technical parenthesis is actually consubstantial to Vera’s work, for hers is a simple work, paratactic in fact, rich in detail but devoid of mystification.”

The exhibition winds through canvases and panels that aim to provoke questions about our relationship with time, nature and the contemplative life. Barren lands, flowering meadows and colorful backgrounds are inhabited by botanical and organic elements and flames, with which human features relate, pointing, healing or destroying. “In her canvases,” writes Sofia Silva of Vera Portatadino, “one encounters numerous symbols derived from ancient and archetypal iconographies, the burning rose, the flower of the Apocalypse, the fire of revelation; Vera does not use symbols as such, rather she encounters them spontaneously.” The artist’s theoretical research is based on the concepts of beauty, pleasure and transience, and an obsession with the marginal, which exists apart from the main scene.

Vera Portatadino(Varese, 1984). She lives and works in Milan. She studied Visual Arts at NABA, Milan, and then moved to London, where she earned a Postgraduate Diploma and Master’s Degree in Fine Art, from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Her research is focused on painting. In 2014 he founded Yellow, a research project on contemporary painting, based in Varese. He won the 2018 Treviglio Prize with the work Yellow of Mars and has participated in several residencies, Italian and foreign.

Recent exhibitions include Botticelli. His Time. E il nostro tempo, Museo Mart, Rovereto (2021); Tetrahedron, Otto Gallery, Bologna (2021); Picture Palace, Transition Gallery, London (2020); Anima Alzati Apriti, solo show, Premio Treviglio (2019); Forme Uniche nella Continuità dello Spazio, Galleria Rizzuto, Palermo (2019); Stand By Me, Pelagica, Milan (2019); Premio Lissone 2018, Museo MAC di Lissone (2018); Supersymmetry, Strizzi, Cologne (2018). His work is part of private and public collections, such as the permanent collection of Mart - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto and the collection of the “Ernesto and Teresa Della Torre” Museum in Treviglio.

For all information, you can visit the official website of OTTO Gallery.

Bologna, at OTTO Gallery the exhibition Tetrahedron by Vera Portatadino

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