Carmelo Zotti's mythical realism is on display at the Gianni Ambrogio Foundation

The Gianni Ambrogio Foundation, at its exhibition venue in Mareno di Piave (Treviso), is offering a selection of previously unpublished works by Carmelo Zotti (Trieste, 1933 - Treviso, 2007) from December 12, 2021 to January 30, 2022. The choice of Dino Marangon, who curates the exhibition (entitled Nel segno del realismo mitico) availing himself of the collaboration of Michele Beraldo and Brigitte Brand, focused on the artist’s works on paper. There are more than 60 plates, often of large and very large format, overflowing with color, spanning Zotti’s entire artistic career. From 1953 when, a student of Bruno Saetti at theVenice Academy, he competed for and won the Bevilacqua La Masa Prize, and until his death in 2007.

The extensive retrospective is promoted by the City of Mareno di Piave, with the collaboration of the Veneto Region and theCarmelo Zotti Archive, and is accompanied by an Antiga catalog, with texts by Michele Beraldo and Dino Marangon. In the papers gathered at Mareno di Piave, the themes that characterize, and make unique, Zotti’s painting return. In this context, the paper medium, precisely because of its characteristics of cheapness, manageability, and possible speed of execution, will be particularly beloved by Zotti.

Carmelo Zotti’s has been a particularly rich and articulated artistic career: a research that from the beginning came side by side with painting and drawing, highlighting the importance of sign expression and its inseparable relationship with color. The exhibition traces the entire arc of the painter’s creativity, starting from his beginnings characterized by an instinctive realistic impulse (significant is one of his intense self-portraits) and the period of his training at the Venice Academy under the guidance of Bruno Saetti.

After having explored, around the mid-1950s, the possibilities of a free paraphrase of reality characterized by an increasingly broader autonomy of sign and colors, in the subsequent series of “Deportees” his always latent inclination to figure will also come confronting the multiple resources of informal. Soon new and significant solicitations will come to Carmelo Zotti from stimulating travels and stays in Egypt, India and Burma, and later in the United States and especially in Mexico, and again in Holland and Germany and in Northern Europe where he will have the opportunity to broaden his horizons by coming into contact with ever different cultures, ways of life and artistic expressions. On these bases, Zotti will come turning his attention to the mysterious universes of eros, to the fascinating and sometimes destabilizing discoveries of anthropology, depth psychology and ethnology, trusting in the possibilities of the image to be able to explore and communicate wider and more vital horizons of freedom.

Also opposing the invasion of new technologies and massified information and the looming and oppressive homogenization of the new consumer society that will find their counterparts in the various phenomenologies of Pop Art, here then is Zotti refounding his creativity immersing himself in the universe of myth, conceived not as a repertoire of scholarly references, but rather as a fermenting imaginative magma capable of expressing and shaping the complex and at times contradictory variety and richness of current existence.

What emerges is a figuration that is at once highly cultured and spontaneous, rich in hidden poetic, philosophical and literary references and gradually nourished by original comparisons with dechirican metaphysics, the different expressions of surrealism, the subtle visual metaphors of the major exponents of symbolism and, again, with the multiform suggestions of Baconian figuration, as well as with the incisive harshness of ’expressionism, until succeeding in refounding a profound and engaging dialogue with nature, in a rediscovered link also with the great Venetian tradition of Titian, Tintoretto and Sebastiano del Piombo.

For all information about the exhibition In the Sign of Mythical Realism, you can visit the official website of the Gianni Ambrogio Foundation.

Pictured: Carmelo Zotti, Figure and Sphinx (2004), mixed media on paper, 61 x 86 cm.

Carmelo Zotti's mythical realism is on display at the Gianni Ambrogio Foundation

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