La Serenissima

“Firstly, I would like to talk about light.

I have recently curated an exhibition about Leonor Fini, a worldwide known painter from Trieste, and with Cristina Battocletti, a journalist working for Sole 24 Ore Italian newspaper and author of an important book about Strehler (this year is the centenary of his birth). The discourse has slipped on the light which remains in the artworks of the artists of Trieste, but also of the artists in a wider sense. You know that Strehler changed the way of directing in the twentieth century through his lighting sets. In Leonor Fini’s paintings, one of the main features are these counterpoints of light.

Light is present in the works of the greatest artists and many artists of Trieste, because as Richard Rogers (great architect and winner of Leone D’Oro prize) said in an interview sometimes ago: “I have travelled the world but I have never seen a light like that of Trieste“.

A light that then enters the DNA, the veins of those who were born in Trieste, and therefore also of Fabio Colussi. This luministic sensitivity is then accentuated in him by a powerful technical ability that comes from the talent he has got. In fact, he is a self-taught – he had no practice in schools – but studied by himself looking at the work of various artists from Trieste such as Barison or Fragiacomo, and learned how to capture landscapes with the eyes, and practised with so much work and so much patience.

His veils are delicate and powerful, there are paintings in this exhibition, in which light is really the main character. He works in the ancient way with preparations of the canvas through the rabbit glue, the chalk, the Spanish white, which requires wisdom, knowledge, and again a lot of work and a lot of passion.

From a stylistic point of view, two values are intertwined in him: the European culture, which is present in all of us from Trieste, but also the Venetian visual culture, which means the light and colors of Venice, the Venetian manner and colorism, the views of Guardi and Canaletto (the more rational part of Canaletto and the more poetic part of Guardi) and as I mentioned before, the study of Julian artists, such as Fragiacomo and Barison, who also studied and worked in Venice; but in him there is this chromatic sensitivity, Enlightenment, linguistic and stylistic power that intertwines these two great cultures to which most of the artists of the Julian area have attached, which were then headed by the academies of Berlin, Munich, Vienna, especially those in Munich where there was the Absolute Vanguard a century ago.

And so, then we could say, as far as the more European culture is concerned, Colussi’s paintings I could also call it neo-romantic, which you know that Romanticism, starting from Sturm und Drang, a cultural movement of the late eighteenth century that was born in Germany, and it is a premise to Romanticism, it was one of the movements that characterized the European thoughts towards the Central European culture.

I mention Caspar Friedrich, the most important German romantic painter, who had this punctuality, this essentiality and also this light that sometimes is grey-blue, which is not the light of Venetian colorism, but the light of Austro-Austrian colorism, mitteleuropean, the culture of the peoples of North-East Europe that we also find in ourselves.

I could go on and talk a lot about Colussi, because he is an artist of powerful intrinsic qualities, of great passion for work and great generosity in painting, but I close here thinking I have said the main clarifying things.”