Curated by Davide Ferri.

Pensai il colore, guardai il sole (I thought of colour, I looked at the sun) is the title of the first exhibit that the Galleria Michela Rizzo dedicates to Saverio Rampin with the intention of shedding light on the work of one of the most important Venetian artists of the second half of the twentieth century. The gallery does this by looking into the interstices, the turning points, and through an original juxtaposition of works from different periods of the artist’s career.

The exhibition includes a series of works (on canvas and paper) belonging to the Sixties and Seventies, the season following the beginning of his career, marked by a poetic suspended between Informal and Spatialism, a language that the artist went on to formulate through daily contact with artists of his generation (Tancredi Parmeggiani and Ennio Finzi in particular - attracted, like him, by the American painting that arrived in Venice at the 1948 Biennale); the influence of masters like Armando Pizzicato and Virgilio Guidi; the discovery of Spatialism, during his frequent trips to Milan.

Pensai il colore, guardai il sole holds this season in the background (the only one that can allow a secure historical location of the artist’s work) and looks at the mature Rampin, namely starting from a moment of transition that took place between the end of the Fifties and the beginning of the Sixties, towards the articulation of a completely autonomous language, marked by the arrival at a notion of “colour - light”, of colour as a luminous event (sometimes lacerating, like when, in some paintings, a narrow slit saturated with colours rips the white colour of the canvas like a flash). And from a progressive opening of the surface to broader and more extensive backgrounds (which is fully realized in the Seventies), a composition conceived as the dynamism of chromatic, vibrating, and unstable bodies because of the fringed contours and the delicate and poetically pale tones that contaminate and relaunch each other.

Rampin’s work is also an abstract grammar that often seems to derive from the enchantment and dazzled observation of nature (it is not by chance that some of his most emblematic works of this turning point are called Momenti di natura/Moments of nature), an epiphany of reality without this, necessarily, translating into figures in his paintings. In fact, the intermittent presence, within a pattern made of geometric and spatial shapes, of elements that can be traced back to reality - the horizon, reflections and movement of water or of things floating on the water’s surface, the sun (constant reference point of the artist’s gaze) – is another possible common thread of the exhibition.