What a void in the art world is the departure of a talented artist such as Ennio Finzi who was ninety-three. His precarious physical condition had prevented him from attending, two weeks earlier, the opening of the exhibition dedicated to him at Ca’ Pesaro, the prestigious International Gallery of Modern Art of the City of Venice. Curated by director Elisabetta Barisoni and critic Michele Beraldo, the homage exhibition to Finzi, which will be open until 6th October, is part of the project to promote the artists in Venice’s town collections.
On display, there is a selection of his fine works, dating from the Fifties and Sixties, such as Yellow on Gray from 1957.
To reach the room devoted to Ennio Finzi (how happy would he have been) and admire his colorful works, we need to pass by paintings and drawings by Gustav Klimt, Marc Chagall, Vasilij Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, as well as several sculptures by Medardo Rosso, Auguste Rodin, Arturo Martini, and Giacomo Manzù.
In 2008, Finzi said, “Color is the retina relishing itself with beauty asking for help from the hearing.”One of the most radical artists of the Italian twentieth century, as Elisabetta Barisoni and Michele Beraldo put it, Ennio Finzi was able to subvert the informal language of the postwar period by pursuing unusual research based on the atonal and timbral values of color, representing a model of painting that Luciano Caramel has defined as “non-ritualistic” emphasizing the great and innovative creativity of the Venetian master.
Conversely, he could also trace a path that was less excited and subtended by perceptive reflection, carrying on in-depth investigation into the intrinsic structures of form, to tame and “bend” its unruly contradictions. “From this concise overview,“ Elisabetta Barison points out, “we have chosen to represent the Venetian artist with some of his most emblematic works of the 1950s, such as the geometric Chromatic Scales, where the intermittent appearance of color unfolds in limpid scores of vertical bands; Vibrating Rhythms, where yellow flows threadlike and slender in rapid, iridescent temporal progress; or such as White on White and Gray on Gray where light is revealed as the spiritual transmission of a dispelled matter, with its labile and indistinct boundaries. ”
Ennio Finzi (Venice,1931), graduated from the Venice Institute of Art, studied violin, and frequented important artists such as Emilio Vedova and Virgilio Guidi in the postwar period. In addition to a solo exhibition in 1956, he exhibited several times at Bevilacqua La Masa group shows since 1949. In 1961, he moved to Milan where he devoted himself to design; in 1964 he moved to Sanremo. In 1968, he returned to his beloved Venice, taking up the post of assistant to Carmelo Zotti at the Academy of Fine Arts. With his language, he also had a “fling” with programmed and kinetic art. In 1986 the invitation to the Venice Biennale was followed by other important awards in Italy and abroad.
Ennio Finzi the painter, the abnormal abstractionist, as he liked to call himself, or, as Francesca Brandes recalls, Finzi the heterodox, the experimenter. With him, “a large part of the artistic consciousness of the Italian Twentieth century disappears since it is impossible to define his work without traversing the second half of the Twentieth century, its historical and cultural fibrillations, and its constant challenges.
