Trento, at the Galleria Civica the solo exhibition of Wainer Vaccari Certezze soggettive

At the Mart, on the premises of the Galleria Civica di Trento, is running until February 27, 2022 Certezze soggettive, the exhibition of Wainer Vaccari (Modena, 1949), the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi and curated by Gabriele Lorenzoni. The exhibition, which comes at a time of general interest in figurative painting, both at the museum and collector level (and consequently the Mart intends to contribute with its exhibitions to one of the most topical debates) presents more than thirty works and a valuable nucleus of drawings highlighting the continuity that characterizes the work of the Modenese artist, poised between psychological investigation and surreality, between dream and play, between fiction and chronicle. The exhibition presents a significant cross-section of Vaccari’s production: his beginnings, in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recent works through previously unpublished works from public and private collections.

Vaccari’s work is located in a personal space, untied from the currents of the moment, and maintains an autonomy that makes it difficult to frame. The artist outlines his own visual universe populated by a series of almost “Fellini-like” characters, dissonant and ironic, framed in well-defined scenes. In the poses, proportions, pictorial compositions and expressions of the protagonists, the forcing of reality is yes alienating, but not to the point of making the scene implausible.In the dreamlike, suspended dimension of his paintings, Vaccari intends to refer back to the German New Objectivity, so close to the Magic Realism of the great 20th-century masters whose masterpieces the Mart preserves and whose exhibitions it has organized several times in the past as well as in recent years. Despite his knowledge of the painting of the old and coeval masters, Vaccari maintains an autonomy that is also solitude, self-exclusion from fashions, which makes him difficult to frame.

Made in two different centuries, the paintings of the first phase and those of the second are united by surreal representations, meaningless gestures, sexual allusions, metaphysical settings, and suspended atmospheres. In the exhibition itinerary, paintings from the two periods are mixed, preferring thematic and stylistic rather than chronological juxtapositions. In search of expressive continuity. Despite the consistency of themes, the production of the end of the millennium presents more defined outlines, flat colors, flatter brushstrokes; the more recent one, on the other hand, is characterized by the inclusion of more fractured strokes, by decompositions of form and overlapping pictorial touches.

Thematic and stylistic rather than chronological juxtapositions prevail in the exhibition itinerary. An example of this is the constant return of very emphatic subjects: these are characters molded from portraits of the artist and his wife. Biographical notes extrapolated from time and over time and reworked through the filter of memory. Although consistent in themes, the production of the end of the millennium presents more defined outlines, flat colors, flatter brushstrokes; the more recent one, on the other hand, is characterized by the inclusion of more fractured strokes, by decompositions of form and overlapping pictorial touches.Also planned is a section devoted to drawings, the lesser-known part of Vaccari’s production. Vaccari has been drawing incessantly, always; what is represented in the exhibition is thus a sample of his vast production. These are sometimes sketches and sketches, others caricatures, but more often they are ideas, cues, drawings made without a specific purpose.

Critic Carlo Sala explains in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, “The artist stages his own personal commedia dell’arte where the characters do not have a precise script, but follow a plot with characters that return in the various paintings even years apart and that have accompanied the artist relentlessly from the early 1980s until the beginning of the new millennium and then reappear in the investigations of the latest phase initiated in 2014. It appears evident how these figures are the synthesis of a plurality of instances from various aesthetic traditions, but also from childhood reminiscences and references to the artist’s everyday life. [...] Each source, evoked or resumed in the works, loses any philological ’tether’ to bend to the visionary arbitrariness of the painter.”

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

Image: Wainer Vaccari, Self-Portrait, detail ( 1982; oil on canvas)

Trento, at the Galleria Civica the solo exhibition of Wainer Vaccari Certezze soggettive

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