In Venice, the most tragic subjects at the heart of the pictorial dialogue of Arnulf Rainer and Emilio Vedova

It has been, for a little over a decade, one of the rituals associated with the great parade of the Venice Biennale : exhibitions are held in the former studio of the painter Emilio Vedova (1919-2006), who by his will has become the seat of a foundation in his name, intended to keep his work alive. The space was fitted out by the architect Renzo Piano, who also intervened in the Magazzino del sale, a few tens of meters away, still on the quay of Zattere, so that the foundation has two places, situation enviable in Venice.

It takes advantage of this by proposing, during each Biennale, an event in homage to its founder. In 2019, this one had been composed by Georg Baselitz, collector and friend of the Venetian painter. This year, it’s another friend: the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer, born in 1929, whom Vedova had met in the 1980s. What they have in common is obvious: the certainty that any work must be the inscription on a surface or in space of the movements of the body and the spirit of its creator; the one that this inscription must reach to the highest degree of intensity in order to subjugate and, to achieve this, dare everything. And this other conviction: the artist must seize the most tragic subjects, which are also those which are common to all human beings, time, suffering, death.

These necessities push, from the 1950s, Vedova to emancipate herself first from any form of premeditated geometry, then from the limits of the canvas. The work is created over the gestures that follow one another. At first, the black and the white scar the surface, crashing into it, leaving intertwined and indecipherable traces. Then this form ofaction painting no longer enough for him. He adds sand, he glues pieces of paper and fragments of photographs, he draws crosses and signs.

Models of ruins

But that’s still not enough: still too mural, still too restrained. The series of Plurimo and Confined, undertaken from 1962, therefore combine the construction of volumes made of planks and beams recovered and assembled with paint which deposits its reds, yellows and blacks. These kinds of polychrome sculptures invade the space and demand that we turn around, instead of remaining peacefully facing the painting. Until its last decade, Vedova returned from time to time to these constructions, the most considerable, which dates from 1993, bearing a title heavy with history: Chi brucia un libro brucia un uomo (“who burns a book burns a man”). A sphere composed of articulated wooden semi-circles opens like the pages of a book, already blackened by fire. It also happens that whole discs form a frieze, the sight of which cannot fail to make one think of war photographs.

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