Walk of Life – by Donatella Chiara Bedello

From Sunday, June 1st, 2025 the personal exhibition by the hyperrealist painter Donatella Chiara Bedello “Walk of Life” opens at the contemporary Art Gallery Ghetto Et Cetera in Venice.

It is with great pride that we host the new personal exhibition by Donatella Chiara Bedello entitled “Walk of Life”.

In this occasion Donatella Chiara Bedello presents a limited number of works that elegantly unfold along a path of life lived in a New York that surprisingly is not characterized as cosmopolitan and tirelessly busy as we are used to, but is instead depicted as “familiar”, “neighborly”: they are the family-run shops, small candy, clothes, record, comic book, food shops, where we have all entered at least once and felt at home, called by name by the dealer who knows our parents, our tastes in an informal environment.

“Walk of life” is the perfect occasion for us to present to her loyal audience in Venice her two unpublished most recent artworks, “Gina’s Flowers” and “Caffè Roma”.

The first one actually is a revelation only to our city: in April 2025 it has been featured in the group exhibition “Naturae Divinus Spiritus” curated by the art and entertainment critic Francesca Mezzatesta at the Ottagono di Santa Caterina in Cefalù (Italy):

For this painting, Donatella has chosen a canvas the size of her first originals, 60×50 cm, the one that in my opinion best expresses her poetics. Poetics of which nothing is missing at first sight: a shopwindow packed with flowers, an open door, a wide open trap door and a typical New York building. There are reflections on the glass, reflections that in everyday life we don’t even notice but that here she makes almost main characters, and they give us visions of the inside and the outside in one go, as if the work didn’t just have two dimensions, yet included a third one, which is not depth but rather what happens behind our back and we can’t see. There’s even a black sack, much loved by her audience because it seems it has just been placed there, it still seems to settle because it is so precise in every detail. And first of all, before the sacks, before the items for sale, there they are: the details that capture our gaze and don’t leave it until after a long time. In this case it is the blue curtain, the house number, the black sack on the left, the blackboard with the “flowers of the day” written by hand in chalk as if it were a bar. As always with Donatella’s works, and it is an opinion shared by all her spectators, these details capture us, they let us look around but then they come back to call us and never leave us again, and this canvas in the speeches becomes “the blue curtain” or “the civic 759” or “the open trap door”, as if the items in the shop were just the mean to build a perfectly successful synecdoche.

The truly unpublished work is “Caffè Roma”, recently completed:

Here too we find all the elements of her poetics in a slightly larger canvas. It is characterized by a considerable use of the color black, not dominant as it had been in “Mellis” of 2024, but very present. It may not be an “Anish-Kapoor-black” but it is a deep black, in which the shadows merge and catalyze our gaze in a relaxing and containing space. Even in this artwork life flows, those who work behind the counter, those who enjoy a cup of steaming coffee, those who live in the opposite building. Donatella’s extraordinary sensitivity as a narrator makes us protagonists of the scene rather than banal spectators: we were walking our way, in New York, and in a broader sense in our life, when suddenly the Caffè Roma invites us to come in and have a “coffee to go” to lighten and better accompany our walking, just as Donatella does with her canvases.

The exhibition is visitable from Sunday 1st to Sunday 22nd, 2025.