It’s Day 279 and I’m running around getting things done before going out and having dinner with my in-laws that are in town.  I haven’t done a collage piece in a while so I did one today.  Join me in honoring Italo Valenti today.  I had to translate his biography from Italian.

Italo Valenti (Milan, April 29, 1912 – Ascona, September 6, 1995) was an Italian painter.

“And it’s probably indulge in this aimless, in these pauses of silence, which one has

the feeling of being closer to themselves, that is, more spontaneous. In living in this world of the unusual, where things often live concealed or lost outside and inside of us, is perhaps the natural phenomenon of forgetting, working almost automatically.”
(Italo Valenti)

He was born in Milan April 29, 1912, the son of wealthy merchants. His was a happy childhood, even in the absence of parents, passed in the house Milan welcomed by the fairy tales of his grandmother who will be a constant source of inspiration for his art. At seven he moved to Vicenza; in the Venetian city attended the School of Arts and Crafts and began working at a goldsmith.

It was the theosophist Free Augenti to him to discover that all the arts are in connection with each other. He held his first solo exhibition in Valdagno in 1932 he enrolled at the Academy of Venice and then at the Academy of Brera where he studied with Aldo Carpi and Eve Tea. At this date also the first trip to Paris and Belgium to the discovery of Cézanne, and painting impressionist and post-impressionist.

In 1937 he entered the Corrente movement with Sassu, Luciano Anceschi, Guttuso, Fontana, Birolli, Cassinari, Raffaele De Grada, Treccani, Benjamin Joppa, Salvatore Quasimodo, Migneco, Morlotti, Vittorio Sereni and others, which referred to civil

and social expressionist art to overcome the provincialism and the rhetoric of Italian art. The participation of Valenti activity of the group was intense: the distinctive feature of his figurative painting was to be found in the sleepy and dreamy lyricism that made mention of “primitivism fantastic,” already stretched to the stylization of the figure that will land as a result of abstract forms.

In 1938 he began his teaching career at the School of nude di Brera, where he taught until 1952, when he moved permanently to Switzerland, Locarno. Here he came in contact with the group of artists that were present at that time in Ascona (Jean Arp, Ben Nicholson, Remo Rossi and Julius Bissier) and this led to a gradual rethinking of his painting: the narrative dimension, more properly figurative, was progressively less as he said more research on the effects of color and space that led him to a phase of “lyrical abstraction informal.”

The themes of the dream “primitivism fantastic” were still present: the magicians, the series of cerfs ruffles, the moons, the theaters, the stations of vessels; but the style was completely different:

the composition was shattered into triangles, trapezoids, rhombuses, primordial symbols and enigmatic with their own “thoughtful lightness.”

It is among the painters that the entrepreneur Giuseppe Verzocchi contacted for its collection of works on the theme of the work: between 1949 and 1950, Valenti realized locomotives (1949-1950), under which, together with the self, is now preserved Collection Verzocchi, at the Pinacoteca Civica of Forlì.

His painting is more pure, clean, composed of a few elements that float in an abstract vacuum. So are created abstract collages of the last artistic production, in which the boyish, the fantastic, dreamlike find their final equilibrium with the symbolic, the enigmatic abstraction, in a vital synthesis and final. In 1985 he was hit by stroke which deprives him of speech and the use of his right arm. For this reasons, the collages that follow belong to what he calls the “era of the left hand.” He died September 6, 1995 in Ascona.

Biography is from Italian wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 279.

Best,

Linda