Milan, at the Permanente an exhibition recounts the art of Guglielmo Spotorno

The Society for Fine Arts and Permanent Exhibition in Milan opens its halls to an exhibition celebrating the career of Guglielmo Spotorno (Milan, 1938). Guglielmo Spotorno. The Art of Life is the title of the exhibition scheduled from Jan. 30 to Feb. 9, 2025, curated by Giovanni Gazzaneo and Flavia Motolese: the exhibition presents forty works that trace the master’s main creative cycles. The exhibition aims to pay tribute to an artist who made his life a work of art. In Guglielmo Spotorno, art was never an activity separate from existence, but the natural outcome of an intensely lived existence. Fisherman, painter, poet, entrepreneur, collector, philosopher, journalist: many lives encapsulated in one, in which each experience helped shape his creative path.

His light-filled colors tell of this interweaving of life and art. His painting, deeply rooted in the tradition of the 20th century but always projected toward personal research, is a reflection of his humanity and philosophical sensibility. The exhibition at Permanente, which Spotorno considers a sort of second home, brings together forty works spanning the main painting cycles of his career. Each painting tells a piece of his story, starting with the first recognition he received at the age of twelve, with the drawing Incubo, awarded at the “Mostra Artistica Internazionale della Scuola.” It was on that occasion that Federico Fellini, struck by the young talent, wanted to meet him in person. Since then, Spotorno has never stopped painting, exploring themes and styles that have ranged from figuration to abstraction, always with a strong emotional and philosophical component. His works reflect a constant dialogue with the world and with himself, an investigation that finds in colors and forms a universal language. Guglielmo Spotorno grew up immersed in art, thanks to the passion of his parents: Franco, an entrepreneur and collector, and Enrica, a gallery owner and sculptor. From this privileged base he had the opportunity to meet great protagonists of the 20th century, including Graham Sutherland, Sebastian Matta, Gianfranco Ferroni and many others. These encounters left an indelible imprint on his artistic vision, which is nourished by a profound dialogue with tradition without ever losing its originality. Accompanying the exhibition is a monograph entitled Guglielmo Spotorno. The Art of Life.

Curator Giovanni Gazzaneo writes: “In Guglielmo, life wins, the thirst for horizons, the thirst for knowledge, the desire to create, the desire to test oneself, to go beyond the limit. Not challenge for the sake of challenge, but challenge for the sake of going beyond, to see what is deeper, truer, more interesting, more lovable. In his creative quest, he thirsts to embrace everything from Genesis to the globalized world [...] Whether it is cut flowers or the sea of his Liguria, the gaze that contemplates nature is always a gaze full of wonder. Guglielmo does not let himself be captured by the detail or dwell on the detail. He embraces reality as he has lived life: he dives into it. He lives it by touching it, savoring it, smelling it, loving it. He knows no middle ground: in what he does, in what he sees, in what he thinks, in what he paints there is always his whole self. Nothing less than the whole of existence. The image shines through in the tight dialogue between the story that springs from lived reality and the inexhaustible and boundless power of fantasy and dream, between light and darkness, knowledge and mystery.”

For Flavia Motolese, curator of the exhibition, “His style becomes more and more symbolic, the intense colors create games of forms that oscillate between geometry and biomorphism, which fluidly transform making reality lose its contours and abstraction acquire meaning. At this intersection of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, he explores the complexities of human experience in and out of time. From the individual subconscious to the collective unconscious, the need to see within oneself coincides with the need to investigate contemporary society, and thus, in the early 2000s, the cycle of ”Humanized Cities,“ which are perhaps his most original and powerful insights, was born. In these provocative works, the artist shows the dramatic contradictions of contemporary society, letting the buildings of urban landscapes speak instead of the inhabitants. The paintings imagine cities from above: places where pain and everyday life seem to intertwine in the solitude of metropolitan life, turning into cages that deprive people of their humanity.”

Instead,Stefano Zuffi, art critic and historian, presents Harmony and Silence, the “guiding” work of the Permanente exhibition: “Canvas after canvas, series after series we enter the tonal harmony sought and found by Spotorno: Harmony and Silence is the title of the painting in which arcane celestial forms appear. It is the work that the artist considers ”the most important I have painted.“ It is an intimate reading of reality entrusted to hints, light strokes, chords of colors and signs. A texture in which dreamlike evocation, allusion, fantasy, impression, reality blend together. Forms sprout, blossom, ferment, meet, seem to want to interlock but then split again, as if by a biological necessity of life, reproduction, movement.”

“My paintings speak for me,” says Guglielmo Spotorno. They are my restless life, which has always asked too many questions of itself and those it has encountered. They are the eye that spies in many directions. Consistency dwells in the colors I love, and they dialogue in their etching the canvas. Black and white give each other energy. Although they are not seen in the paintings, in reality black and white are there. Opposite poles of a restlessness I had since childhood. I never stood still, I always wanted to look beyond."

For all information, you can visit the Permanente Museum’s official website.

Milan, at the Permanente an exhibition recounts the art of Guglielmo Spotorno

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