Farewell to Walter Valentini, master of rigorous geometries

Walter Valentini, internationally renowned painter, sculptor and engraver, passed away in the night at the age of 93.

Born in Pergola in 1928, his cultural and professional training began in Urbino, at the Scuola del Libro, where he learned engraving techniques such as intaglio, lithography and woodcut, and where he began working with paper. In the 1950s he moved to Milan, where he had three great protagonists of abstract rationalism, such as Max Huber, Albert Steiner and Luigi Veronesi, as teachers. In the 1960s his Urbino training was enriched by the international experimentalisms and tensions that flowed into Milanese galleries and magazines. His first major exhibitions were held in Milan at the Galleria Vinciana, in 1974, and at Il Milione, in 1982, which opened to him the doors of foreign galleries and major museums around the world.

His works are steeped in the artistic culture of the Renaissance, based onharmony andbalance, the sense of space and architectural proportions, the abstract research of the Russian Constructivists and the great masters of abstraction and spatialism. His drawings, paintings and sculptures often deal with the themes of time, the cosmos, such as the great cycles of works like the Rooms of Time, the Wall of Time, or the series devoted to the City of the Sun and the Ideal City, and again in the large plates of the cycle The Measures, the Sky.

He has also produced artist’s books, also in fine limited editions, of literary texts by classical and contemporary authors, including Tommaso Campanella, Giacomo Leopardi, Mario Luzi, Giacomo Oreglia, Basilio Reale, and Robert Walser.

In the course of his activity, he has exhibited in numerous private galleries and in Italian and foreign museums, and has won various awards, such as the Grand Prix of the 10th International Graphic Design Biennial in Krakow, the first prize at the 56th Michetti Prize in Francavilla al Mare, and the XXVIII International Graphics Prize “DO FORNI” organized with the collaboration of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

In 2017 the exhibition Walter Valentini. The rigor of geometry, the fractures of art 1973 - 2017 (you can read our review here).

The Municipality of Pergola, his hometown, has received clearance to set up three rooms entirely dedicated to the Pergolese master inside the Museo dei Bronzi Dorati, in agreement with the Marche Superintendency and the Administration, and the opening is scheduled for July 2022.

"Walter Valentini was a master of the Italian twentieth century with that vision of art and life, which only those who went through that century, from the mid-1960s in Italy, can understand its tensions. His is a profoundly ’material’ act, built on observation, that original ability to ’know how to see’ by engraving in history, in poetry in a continuous, patient work of one who using his hands and paper, gesture after gesture, dust on dust, blue on blue, with the strength of the wise observer, which Valentini knew how to interpret so well, harmoniously returned heavenly works, fragments in the making, traces in relief. A master of engraving. Rigorous geometries, clocks of Time." These are the words with which the City of Pergola expresses its condolences for the artist’s passing.

Farewell to Walter Valentini, master of rigorous geometries

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