ANTONIO SCACCABAROZZI
Diafanés
28 January 2025 – 6 April 2026
Venice, Fortuny Museum
Curated by
Ilaria Bignotti
Camilla Remondina
In collaboration with
Galleria Clivio, Milano-Parma
The site-specific exhibition entitled Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés is devoted to the dialogue between the work and the gaze that goes beyond it.
Through the concept of the diaphanous, the exhibition is intended to allow the emergence of linguistic and methodological affinities between the artistic research of one of the protagonists of neo-concrete and conceptual Italian art between the 1970s and the new millennium, Antonio Scaccabarozzi, and the eclectic and exuberant investigation of his host here, Mariano Fortuny.
Consisting of light, translucent, colourful and transparent works, the exhibition interweaves visual arts and the semiotics and phenomenology of the image, inviting the public to embark on an intense journey of investigation of Scaccabarozzi’s work. The exhibition focuses on the works realized between the 1980s and the early two thousands, when the artist began to use first acetates and then polyethylene as his preferred fields for the creation of events in the painted space and as sites of exploration of the relationships between architecture, the observer and the work. Fascinated by its lightness, transparency and versatility, Scaccabarozzi saw polyethylene as the site enabling him to take on the problem of vision and its limits, consideration of the double, the front and back of the painting and its relationship and extension in space on a new level, to the point of making it autonomous and independent from every other artistic technique.
The cycles of Free Quantities, works in which colour is released onto the transparent surface, Polyethylenes, sheets of this material cut and shaped in forms of architectural descent, and Ice-Fields, overlapping coloured plastic membranes intended to create unprecedented chromatic tones, are in an ideal dialogue with the extraordinary insights of Mariano Fortuny: from the pleat, capable of radically changing the idea and features of clothing, to the search for the iconographic alphabets of the past, to the attention devoted to the new technologies of his time. Furthermore, the two artists have in common the inspiration provided by the statuary and architecture of Ancient Greece and the study of colour hues in their calibrated potential and their assonances with the ancient. Both seem to be attentive and cultured weavers of diaphanous works, placed in the hands and eyes of the public with the request to scrutinize them and go beyond them, to see through their stratifications in the name of a contemplation filled with poetry.
This is an exhibition that presents itself, therefore, as a plastic fresco marked by the rhythm of the degrees of the visible, in which the work becomes the diaphragm of a chromatic and seductive breath, interrogating the user as a “limit zone of contrasting forces”, as Scaccabarozzi has declared.