Two years after Luciano Ventrone's passing, his painting truer than life comes to Venice

From May 13 to July 16, 2023 Palazzo Pisani Revedin (Campo Manin) hosts the exhibition Ventrone. Nature is Dead Painting is Alive, curated by Luca Beatrice, promoted by Venice International University and the Fondazione Ventrone Gibilisco, with the organization of il Cigno GG Edizioni and Villaggio Globale International. Two years after the passing of Luciano Ventrone, the Roman artist’s “truer than life” painting, his famous still lif es and more come to Venice.

“Often complicated by the exercise of the most difficult and most reckless anamorphosis (but perfectly carried out and calibrated) Luciano Ventrone’s painting is a continuous optical discovery, an incessant recovery of objective reality, which re-emerges after the flood of abstract forms, cerebral logogryphs, material lumps and gestural writings.” so wrote Federico Zeri of the artist he called"The Caravaggio of the 20th century" who had caught his attention in the late 1980s.

It was an insight that prompted critics to compare still lifes of yesterday and today and to analyze the affinities between the painting of the great seventeenth-century artist and Ventrone’s prowess, but also to understand the elements of the artist’s modernity and topicality and the ultimate reasons for his art: the very special rendering of light, the virtuosic reproduction of the idealized object, the almost microscopic analysis of reality to capture what escapes the naked eye, thanks to the mediation of photography, the search for pure form and the exaltation of technique.

Thirty-five of the artist’s canvases will be exhibited in Venice, including three “exceptions” to the still life genre such as Alice, a nude of a woman portrayed from behind from 2015, and two marinas from 2011 and 2021. Luca Beatrice confronts Ventrone’s painting on this occasion for the first time, identifying his approach and the antithetical approach of Giorgio Morandi as the only two ways for a current, contemporary and innovative rendering of still life. “Morandi keeps the palette low and pushes painting toward its degree zero, thin, lean, minimal, almost as if the subject no longer existed or at least did not matter to him... Ventrone is, on the contrary, the pinnacle of inspiration, of virtuosity. ”Ventrone exaggerates,“ Vittorio Sgarbi wrote with reason. In front of his paintings anyone is amazed that human hand can produce such effects, craft painting blending into mechanical reproduction,” Beatrice wrote. According to the curator, Ventrone “cools, indeed freezes” the chosen subject: “he vivisects it by bringing it to the brink of the abyss, beyond there is nothing left and not even a technically reproduced image can cross this limit. If this nature is called dead there must be a reason,” reflect Beatrice, “Ventrone takes the challenge literally by returning an obitorial feeling to it. There is nothing alive in his painting anymore except the painting. Nature is dead, painting is alive.”

Ventrone himself called himself “an abstractionist grappling with reality,” “a metaphysician forced to measure himself against the transience of nature,” as if to imply that his was a struggle against decomposition, against death.

Image: Luciano Ventrone, Flames of Sunset (2010; oil on mixed media on linen canvas, 50 x 60 cm)

Two years after Luciano Ventrone's passing, his painting truer than life comes to Venice

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