Giovanni Soccol's unpublished Venetian night reflections at the Fortuny Museum

Until October 2, 2023, the Fortuny Museum in Venice is hosting on the ground floor the exhibition Giovanni Soccol. Nocturnal Reflections, curated by Chiara Squarcina and promoted by the City of Venice and the Fondazione Musei Civici Veneziani. A cycle of ten previously unpublished pictorial works by the Venetian painter that stems from the vision ofVenetian architecture rising from the water, reflecting as it dissolves. Soccol wanted to represent the fascination of an apparition that can vanish, belonging more to a dream than to reality.

“Presiding over the whole,” is the analysis of the Area Director of Museum Activities, Chiara Squarcina, “is an analysis of the geometric relationships that bind the compositional elements in a vision that is not perspective, but projected orthogonally to the canvas so as not to alter the geometry of the forms.” “A nocturnal light connects and unites the elements, giving the architectures a metaphysical atmosphere, not new in the Venetian artist’s research as it constitutes the fil rouge that underlies his research in recent decades.”

For this series of paintings, Soccol has chosen ten architectures-symbols facing the Grand Canal, starting from the Dogana de Mar to the Church of San Simeone, each of which has aroused particular interest in him.

The canvases are all painted in mixed media, that is, lean tempera base, water-in-oil emulsion bodies, and oil-resin glazes, all prepared directly in the artist’s atelier, following research into traditional historical methodologies of which Giovanni Soccol has also explored in detail as part of the conference Techniques of Painting in Italy between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, organized by Ca’ Foscari University precisely at Palazzo Fortuny in 2019.

Soccol is a painter, architect and set designer. He trained artistically in the 1950s under Ilse Bernheimer and Gennaro Favai and then Guido Cadorin. In 1956 he attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and graduated in Architecture in 1967 with lecturer Carlo Scarpa. In 1974 he succeeded Mario Deluigi in the chair of Scenography at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. His first solo exhibition was held in Trento, Italy, at the Argentario Gallery in 1969.

Soccol’s painting, in the non-figurative period, develops an emotional and impalpable perception of the world, made up of micro-signs, colored dots and vibrant colors that charge the pictorial work with a strong psychological value. The Visions and Months series are an expression of this. This is followed by an approach to figuration through the Islands and Basilicas in the late 1980s. In his later production, the Tankers, Theaters, Tides and Labyrinths of Invention, characterized by images with a strong dreamlike power, a pictorial fabric aimed at achieving effects of luminosity in the chiaroscuro contrast of the masses plays a primary role.

Giovanni Soccol's unpublished Venetian night reflections at the Fortuny Museum

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