The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which hosts the great cycle of Teleri by Jacopo Tintorettoopens up to modern and contemporary art with the project “San Rocco Contemporaneo: in dialogue with Tintoretto”. the project brings together five great artists of the international twentieth century with the work of the Mannerist master.
The first appointment of this cycle is dedicated to the figure of Emilio Vedova, a protagonist of the international scene of the twentieth century and for the first time his works will be exhibited which testify to the deep bond that the young Vedova felt towards the work of Tintoretto up to the maturity of the most recent works, in a Vedova-Tintoretto exhibition which will remain open until November 3, 2013 was created in collaboration with Scuola Grande di San Rocco and by the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation.
The works directly referring to Jacopo Tintoretto will be exhibited, according to the project by Germano Celant and Stefano Cecchetto, as in an ideal journey and dialogue over time as if the spectator can relive and perceive the attentive and sensitive gaze that provoked Vedova in that situation of strong attraction while the Oltre cycle will be installed in the Sala Terrena between the columns of the central nave.
It will be possible to see Vedova's studies from Tintoretto, made in different eras starting from 1936, two sculptures and a large canvas from the Sixties up to the Oltre cycle that the artist created in 1985, in an ideal itinerary that finds Vedova in the places of Tintoretto.
From the critical text by Germano Celant: The transmission of the chromatic gesture from Tintoretto to Vedova takes shape through common elements such as passion and fury, the relationship with the city, Venice, the cursed spirit, looking forward, inner density, the drive to open painting to the volume and the singularity of a solitude that "multiplies the mental forces and pushes them to paroxysm". An artistic existence that insists on the density of representation that leads to an extreme condition of painting, that of an artistic ritual that focuses on the human being both as actor and spectator. It is the attempt to redeem the being from the anguish of death and life by seeking in Tintoretto a spiritual response, connected with the world of the sacred, and prompting Vedova to investigate an action and a gesture which in their visual violence put discussion every answer that is not physical and concrete, secular. In fact, in parallel with the immersion in chromatic density, echoed by Tintoretto, Vedova expresses his conflicts with art and with the sacred, of which he recognizes the extreme greatness, with an attempt at destruction of signs, conducted through an aggressive graphic feel and disruptive “Ascent to Calvary”, 1940. He pushes charcoal and ink to the limit of the visible, almost disqualifies the visible in favor of a magma, almost shapeless: “Collection of Manna”, 1956 and “Erection of the bronze snake” , 1956).
From that of Stefano Cecchetto: The two artists reveal, through the curtain of their gaze, the restless habit of their immense figurative imagery: looking at the fixity of those faces, the awareness appears that the time of innocence is over, there is still time for confidence: once longer and more distant where it is possible to dilute the memory, where it is desirable to line up memories, not with the procedure of an inventory, but with the determination to recognize all those signals that reveal the wounds of the soul, within which countless re-emerge silences and precipitous descents. And where every shadow of chiaroscuro, every delay, the uncertainty of every sign, even the most distant and imperceptible, declares its belonging to the search for an unexpressed truth and the sublime aspiration to tell it. The fluid of this painting: the energetic exasperation of this visual imagery, leads to the condition of a vital path which reveals in each painting the media process of an incessant autobiography.
Jacopo Robusti known as Tintoretto after his father's profession Giovanni Battista, dyer of fabrics and silk, was born in Venice in 1519, a date that can be deduced from the death certificate of 31 May 1594 in which he is indicated as seventy-five years old. Around 1550 he marries Faustina Episcopi, mother of, among others, Marietta (about 1554), Domenico (1560) and Marco (1561), also painters active in his father's organized workshop. Just twenty Jacopo is already an independent teacher; the years of his training therefore cross that very vital period in which the Venetian pictorial scene was profoundly renewed under the urgency of mannerist stimuli. The first works of the artist are affected by this particular climate and are rich in stylistic suggestions that refer to the ease of invention of Bonifacio Veronese and Schiavone.
The first prestigious affirmations can already be found in 1547 with some significant works: The Last Supper for the church of San Marcuola and the Miracle of San Marco painted in 1548 for the Scuola Grande di San Marco and now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. With an inner tension that flows into the poetics of light, outside the academic conventions, Tintoretto tackles the great religious and secular themes in absolute independence from the other protagonists of the Venetian art scene of the time and, if in the celebratory canvases of Palazzo Ducale one perceives the presence of the workshop , in the works of sacred history the distinctive sign of a painting in solitude is confirmed. In works such as The Wedding at Cana of 1561, in the new cycle of canvases created for the Scuola Grande di San Marco between 1562 and 1566 - among which is The Finding of the Body of St Mark - and in the large paintings for the church of the Madonna dell'Orto, Tintoretto confirms the chiaroscuro plot in the dynamic grandeur of a scenic conception pervaded by a constant existential restlessness. We find the same restlessness in the spectacular cycle of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, begun in 1564, in which the artist affirms his exceptional talent and his visionary expressive force. The extraordinary pages of his painting reveal, in the narration of these teleri, all his strength of the enterprise: each canvas remains in the place where the painter conceived, saw and wanted it, in a building that becomes his Sistine Chapel. Jacopo Tintoretto is also distinguished by the conspicuous series of portraits created during his long artistic career; much sought after by the Venetian nobility and by the institutional personalities of the Republic, the artist creates, among others, the Portrait of Alvise Cornaro; the Portrait of Doge Alvise Mocenigo; the portraits of his friend Jacopo Sansovino and the two Self-Portraits: the one as a young man now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the extraordinary self-portrait as an old man that we can admire at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Emilio Vedova, born in Venice into a family of craftsmen-workers, began working intensely as a self-taught artist since the 1942s, painting figures and architecture. At a very young age, in 1944, he joined the Corrente anti-Novecentist movement. An anti-fascist, he participated between 1945 and 1946 in the Resistance and in 1948, in Milan, he was among the signatories of the Oltre Guernica manifesto. In the same year in Venice he was one of the founders of the Nuova Secessione Italiana then Fronte Nuovo delle Arti. In 1952 he took part in his first Venice Biennale, an event that often saw him as the protagonist: in 1960 a personal room was dedicated to him, in 1997 he received the Gran Prize for painting, in 1954 he received the prestigious Golden Lion for his career. In the early fifties he created his famous cycles of works: Clash of situations, Cycle of protest, Cycle of nature. In 1961, at the II Biennial of São Paulo, he won a prize that allowed him to spend three months in Brazil, whose extreme and difficult reality affected him deeply. In 60 at the Teatro La Fenice he created the sets and costumes for Luigi Nono's Intolleranza '1984 with whom he also collaborated in 1961 for Prometheus. Since 1963 he has been working on the Plurimi, first the Venetian ones then the Berlin ones created, in fact, in Berlin between 1964 and 64 including the seven of the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch '1964 present at the Documenta in Kassel in 1955 where he had already exhibited in 1959, in 1982 and then in 1965. From 1967 to 1998 he worked on Spazio/Plurimo/Luce for the Montreal EXPO. He carries out an intense teaching activity in some American universities and subsequently at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg and at the Venice Academy. His artistic career is characterized by a constant desire for research and innovative strength. In the 2006s he created the Plurimi Binari cycles Lacerazione and the Cosiddetti Carnevali and in the XNUMXs the large cycles of teleri up to the Dischi, Tondi, Oltre and in continuum. He receives numerous and prestigious awards and recognitions. Among the last major personal exhibitions, the great anthology at the Castello di Rivoli in XNUMX and, after his death in XNUMX, at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome and at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.
Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco – S. Polo 3054
Monday – Sunday 9.30 – 17.30 (the ticket office closes at 17)
