Matisse and the Light of the Mediterranean
28.09.2024 – 04.03.2025
Mestre, Centro Culturale Candiani
Second floor exhibition rooms
Exhibition curated by
Elisabetta Barisoni
The new exhibition project conceived for the Centro Culturale Candiani again stems from the civic collections of modern art at Ca’ Pesaro and another all-important master of the 20th century: Henri Matisse. The exhibition starts from the precious graphic collections of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, which has three important lithographs by the French artist dated to the 1920s and two drawings from his output in 1947.
Works by the Fauve master create a dialogue with artists who were close to him in life and took part in the same artistic revolutions, such as Henri Manguin, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy and Pierre Bonnard. Expressionist freedom in the use of colours and lines was at the heart of Matisse’s work, as well as of those artists who sought to capture the Mediterranean light in their painting. As Derain wrote in a letter to Vlaminck, they wanted to express a “golden light that suppresses shadows”.
In the exhibition, Matisse forms a sort of thread running through the history of 20th-century art, connecting various artists who worked on the inner qualities of mimetic painting, optical and conceptual at the same time. Light and colour are the fulcrum of the whole exhibition, expressed in the dazzling beauty of the Mediterranean and the arabesque lines of female figures. The importance of drawing, almost an obsession in Matisse, is here flanked by reflections on the decorative art, on ornament, the arabesque line, and at the same time on the “pleasure in drawing” that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes of.
Distinct research projects and productions, however, create a choral narrative all through the exhibition. They range from the friendship between Derain and Matisse, travelling on the Mediterranean coast of France in the summer of 1905, to the centrality of certain places, such as Nice and Saint-Tropez, the latter becoming an icon of 20th-century art and culture. The background to these events is the Midi, the French South, a fundamental place for the evolution of modern European art. A geography of the soul and artistic creation, the Mediterranean is the protagonist of colour freed by the wild expressionism of the Fauves, the “beasts”, and then enters the study of form that is perhaps the most important artistic and moral legacy left by Matisse to the new generations.
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