The work chosen as the image of the exhibition is "In the green heart" executed in 1965 and which the following year participated in the Venice Biennale.
”For me – says Casamonti – Dorazio was much more than a true protagonist of European abstract painting and an important intellectual who knew how to help strengthen ties between our country, Europe and the United States. He was a dear friend. Beyond any doubt, adds Roberto Casamonti, Dorazio played a key role in the art of his time, a leading avant-gardist of European abstract painting. And at the same time, writer, art critic, cultured polemicist, professor for a decade at the University of Pennsylvenia, experimenter in the field of decorative arts and urban design, organizer of events, attentive observer and shrewd commentator on contemporary artistic research . An artist and intellectual whose richness and versatility of interests make it difficult today to pigeonhole into rigid classifications”.
Their first meeting took place in the 80s when Casamonti began his career as a contemporary art collector and gallery owner, already taking an interest in and frequenting artists such as Widow, roller, Fontana, Butters, Pomodoro e Ceroli. But for Dorazio there was something different, special, a true friendship was born which was only interrupted by Dorazio's death in 2005.
The exhibition presents works that participate in the memory, canvases that represent precise episodes lived between Casamonti and Rotella. All canvases where the calligraphic ability of the artist lives in the colour.
I agree – recalls Casamonti – with what Serge Lemoine wrote in the catalog of a recent, major Parisian exhibition on Dorazio: “Thanks to Dorazio, Italian art has freed itself from provincialism, has returned to the height of its past and Italy has discovered new horizons”.
cover image: Piero Dorazio, Three waters 2, 1972, oil on canvas, 136×361 cm
