ANTONELLO VIOLA
ORO. VIOLA. ANTONELLO VIOLA ENCOUNTERS A PAINTING BY FILIPPO LIPPI
NOVEMBER 17TH 2022 - JANUARY 31ST 2023
SALAMON OLD MASTERS, MILAN
SALAMON&C is pleased to present a solo show of Antonello Viola.
ORO.VIOLA
Antonello Viola Encounters a Painting by Filippo Lippi
The exhibition brings together a selection of seven unpublished works on Japanese paper, and comes a few months after the great exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.
The idea is that painting requires a slow, very slow, process and that each painting calls the artist into a long-standing relationship, it is a dialogue between two otherness that contaminate each other. Antonello Viola's works develop through a series of emblematic moments that characterize his practice: a sheet of Japanese paper of medium or small format as the beginning, a series of successive stratifications, of fields and tones of color tones that reciprocally relaunch, reacting one to the other and thickening the paper until it dissolves in the color. It is not exactly paper, therefore, but this "color paper" that is the specific medium of the artist; the arrival of a last layer of gold leaf, or white gold or copper, which gives each work the appearance of an "almost monochrome". A layer that closes, seals and preserves, and at the same time constitutes a new beginning: only after having spread / applied it, the artist begins a meticulous process of excavation (a light excavation, which support the randomness of the surface), a new design of the artwork, which is carried out retroactively and by operating scrapings and delicate removals, and which allows the underlying layers, the material life of the painting, to emerge in small areas and along the margins.
The works have very long chronologies (sometimes frighteningly long, of years): each work is therefore a time segment, a portion of life.
As for the National Gallery in the Salamon Gallery, Antonello Viola dialogues with the past; past that often helps him to reinterpret and mend with the present. The opportunity comes from the careful study of a work that is at the same time of extraordinary lightness and power; a wonderful "Madonna with child" which is the only work by Filippo Lippi present in a private collection.
PRESS REVIEW