ITALO VALENTI

Spending his formative years in Venice and Milan, Italo Valenti enriched his artistic background with journeys to Paris and Belgium to discover Cézanne and impressionists, as well as Post-Impressionist paintings. He adhered to the movement Corrente, characterized by civil and social commitment by expressionist art to overcome the rhetoric of Italian art. In the years of the movement, the distinctive feature of his figurative painting – already stretched to the stylization of the figure in the direction of abstract art – lies in a kind of dreamy lyricism populated by persons of great primitivism as sorcerers, series of kites, moons, theaters, stations and boats. In Ascona, Ticino he came into contact with Jean Arp, Ben Nicholson, Remo Rossi and Julius Bissier; the association with this group of artists leads to a gradual rethinking of his paintings in direction of research on color and spatial effects that led him to a phase of “informal lyrical abstraction”. His subjects float in space and break up in triangles, trapezius’, rhombus’, primordial and enigmatic symbols: thus, abstract collages are being created in his last artistic production.

Galerie Wenger has shown Italo Valenti’s work for the first time in 2014.