Valentina D'Amaro's evening landscapes are on display at Luca Tommasi's in Milan

From May 25 to July 7, 2023, Luca Tommasi Contemporary Art Gallery in Milan welcomes Valentina D’Amaro ’s (Massa, 1966) first solo exhibition at the gallery, Le nuvole non potranno annientare il sole. The exhibition, whose title is inspired by the verse of a famous song by Franco Battiato, covers the entire surface of the gallery and presents a selection of unpublished oil works from the most recent Vespro cycle and some earlier ones from the Viridis series. In Valentina D’Amaro’s practice, the landscape is first personally photographed, then, after a careful selection, the image is digitally processed following a mental vision that the artist has conceived based on the potential of the scene, and which will take shape in a drawing on canvas and in subsequent slow and thoughtful layers of oil color.

As Roberto Borghi, curator of the exhibition, explains, "The combination of minuteness and allusiveness, of optical fulfillment and intuition of a constitutive aporia, becomes over the years the leitmotif of increasingly dense and structured pictorial cycles, the culmination of which is represented by Viridis. The subject, if we want to call it that, of this series of works created since 2015 is not only, as the literal translation of the Latin term would suggest, green, but the archetype of green: that idea of vigor, of primordial vitality, which is inherent in the Indo-European root ’ghvar,’ to which other words, such as virgula or virility, are etymologically connected. It is in Viridis that the metaphysical substratum of Valentina’s painting comes to the surface, that sense of submerged continuity of being that finds its most emblematic dimension in nature. [...] Valentina’s most recent works are entitled Vespers like those that immediately precede the Viridis series, but they seem to depart from both one and the other. The element of greatest discontinuity lies in the apparently narrative character of the composition. Depicted at the moment of dusk, the landscape reveals a hitherto unknown drama, but at the same time a serenity that seemed inconceivable in the paintings of the past, mostly shot through with a subtle, indecipherable apprehension. The narrative has its fulcrum in the clouded skies that form the preponderant part of the image: it is here that the title of the exhibition finds its raison d’être. “The clouds will not be able to annihilate the sun,” recalling the lyrics of one of Franco Battiato’s most mystical songs, is a true declaration of faith in the positivity of reality that is projected against the backdrop of nature. The landscape is a participant in a cosmic drama whose epilogue is foreshadowed by a light on the horizon: this is what works as complex as they are resolved in their extreme tonal calibration seem to tell us."

Valentina D’Amaro was born in Massa (MS) in 1966. A graduate in Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, she lives and works between Milan and Lunigiana. She has exhibited in national and international events and public spaces including: Barbican Centre, London; MMKK, Klagenfurt; Prague Biennale, Prague; Hangart-7, Salzburg; Guang Dong Museum of Art, Canton; Palazzo Reale, Milan; PAC, Milan; Triennale, Milan; 54th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Te, Mantua; Palazzo della Permanente, Milan; MAC, Lissone; Villa Reale, Monza; PAC, Ferrara; GAM, Udine; Palazzo della Ragione, Verona; Museo Michetti, Francavilla al Mare; Palazzo Parasi, Cannobio; Castello Visconteo, Legnano; Palazzo Ducale, Massa. Winner in 2005 of the 6th Cairo Prize. In 2016 her work was included in the publication Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, edited by Phaidon.

The exhibition will be open Tuesday through Saturday 4 - 7 p.m. and by appointment.

Valentina D'Amaro's evening landscapes are on display at Luca Tommasi's in Milan

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