Valentino Vago was born in 1931 in Barlassina, a town in the province of Monza and Brianza. He devoted his entire life to art and passed away on January 17th. An exhibit at the Academy of the Beautiful Arts di Brera celebrates his genius with the exhibition "Incisioni (1952-1959)", an exhibition that pays homage to the artistic research of Valentino Vago by presenting to the Milanese public a corpus of over forty etchings re-edited in 2014 starting from the original plates made by artist during the XNUMXs. The restoration of the plates and the printing were carried out by the Pilar Dominguez Art Stamperia.
The exhibition, conceived in collaboration with the Valentino Vago Archive, explores the artist's engraving production and will be open to the public from 25 October to 21 December 2018, while the inauguration will be held on 24 October at 12.
Valentino Vago devoted himself to engravings starting from 1951 by attending courses at the Brera Academy, held by Benvenuto Disertori, one of the leading Italian engravers of the early twentieth century and a lecturer in Brera from 1930 to 1960 and, in 1956, exhibited his works in his first ever exhibition at the Bramante Gallery in Busto Arsizio.
The artist's interest in etching transcends the years of study, as evidenced by his membership, from 1957 to 1960, in the Associazione Incisori d'Italia and his participation in all the exhibitions and competitions organized by the institution, in those years chaired by Carlo Carrà and Aldo Carpi. In these first years of activity, Valentino Vago's interest in graphics often anticipated, in the subjects, the images then entrusted to painting, making the two techniques almost complementary. Observing the works on display, one can retrace the vision of reality that the artist communicated through multiple expressive themes: everyday figures, peasants at work, rural landscapes, naturalistic scenes, up to the abstract compositions, in which the center of interest research is no longer the subject or form, but the creative act of something in the making, a prelude to the artistic research that will characterize the work of the master in the Sixties.
Since 1979 he has devoted himself continuously to mural painting, painting public and private environments in Italy and abroad. Furthermore, a dozen of his works are contained within churches.
Vago's engraving story ended within a few years, but the quality of his research and of the works produced in etching is testified by their presence in prestigious collections, as in the case of the Civic Collection Bertarelli at the Castello Sforzesco and the Civic Collection of Drawing by Salo
