Emilio Vedova, Tondi e Oltre
works 1985-1987
in collaboration with Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova
05.03.2022 — 23.07.2022
Show introduction
An exhibition devoted to Emilio Vedova is scheduled from 5 March next at Galleria dello Scudo in Verona. It focuses on a selection of about thirty works never shown before produced between 1985 and 1987, when the distinctive feature of his painting became that “circle-shape” that he himself termed “a possible dimension of ‘other’ feeling.”
The exhibition presents the Tondi and Oltre, united by the recurrent presence of the circular element. In the former case it is the format of the support, in the latter the perimeter of the painting inscribed in a square canvas. The exhibition now documents the different solutions adopted, varied by the use of materials, techniques and dimensions. Both in the large measure – almost three meters in diameter – and the more compact one of the smaller works of 1987, the gestures open up into a boundless variety of interventions, in which furrows, incisions, layerings, sketches and clots of pigment combine in an endless repertoire with a powerful pictorial intensity. Vedova sketched, painted and glued without imposing an order on himself, rather challenging and renouncing the supremacy of the centre. In the Tondi he is the mobile centre of gravity within the work, in the Oltre he bounds the perimeter of the tondo in the square surface, so heightening the ambiguous conflict between “circle/square, square/circle.”
In the artistic tradition the circle is perfection and cosmic harmony, the symbol and principle of a superior, sacred order. For the mature artist it became the reason and limit of an experiment, in other words the shape in which to formulate a new attempt. “When I took the circle by the throat I did it almost as a kind of challenge against this sacred figure ‘Sancta sanctorum’. Michelangelo's tondo, Raphael's tondo!... To see whether this form could be prostrated, involved in this our laceration, whether something could still be done somehow within it - precisely because I was now facing perhaps the figure I found most prohibitive. Because the circle is always the circle of ideology. And the circle of Christianity. It is the circle of humanism. And the circle of the mandala.”
↣ Read moreInstallation view
Artist
After joining the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, Vedova is among the most important exponents of the abstract current of Italian painting, based on the use of gestural painting of great expressive power. Author in 1964 of the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch, a series of Plurimi exhibited at Documenta Kassel, he links his name to some important pictorial cycles, including De America (1976-1977), Tondi and Oltre (1985-1986) which are flanked by large canvases from the 80s.
