Lia Rumma Gallery is pleased to present, at its Milan venue, a solo exhibition dedicated to one of the leading figures of contemporary Italian art: Ettore Spalletti.
Belonging to no particular movement, Spalletti consistently rejected any form of categorisation. In his work, the dialogue between classical and contemporary art unfolds through a practice in which painting and sculpture merge in the pursuit of an essential dimension and a new conception of spatiality, in constant dialogue with the art of the past, from Beato Angelico to Piero della Francesca and Raffaello, through to Morandi. It is in colour, which runs throughout the history of art, that Spalletti’s language identifies the source from which forms emerge. Geometries and archetypal forms, imbued with colour, lead painting to become sculpture, while sculpture takes on a painterly quality. “I think of myself as a painter, a painter who has also painted in the round.” His colours are not colours “of the surface”, but “atmospheric” ones, endowed with a profound emotional quality. They suggest a passage; they welcome those who observe them, reflecting light back into the space they occupy. Paintings with inclined frames or bevelled edges are arranged throughout the space, becoming protagonists of a collective work; the forms shed the rigidity of the geometry from which they originated, filling instead with a material that, like mist, breaks apart into a fine dust. These are “pictorial bodies” that continually draw the viewer’s gaze, arousing a powerful tactile desire: they welcome us, yet do not wish to be touched. Curated by the Ettore Spalletti Foundation, the exhibition brings into dialogue works from different periods that meet, without hierarchy, within an “atemporal” dimension; they do not simply occupy a place, but reveal it. To enter Spalletti’s world is to enter into colour, a colour that does not describe but rather “happens”. It gathers in the mixture developed by the artist, settles on the surface like pigment, and spreads through the air, becoming a “volume of colour”. A place where colour seems not so much to be seen as to be traversed.
