Listen to the audio version of the article
Going through the exhibition, curated in detail as well as in its overall vision by the curator and daughter Maura Pozzati, imposing and articulate, it is clear how the heart of Pozzati’s art is totally immersed in his life. And viceversa.
In fact, Concetto was born immersed in art, his futurist uncle Severo Pozzati. the sister’s husband the artist Wolfango, the father friend of De Chirico, the friend Rodolfo Aricò and the myth Magritte. He is a modern man however, who studies and learns the art of advertising, the language of modern visual communication, already evident from his works, Black Rose from 1969. He knows and inherits the anguish for the future, the existential doubt. He searches and searches, continuously.
Venice Biennale
He fights to build artistic dignity and “plots” for change, he knows and affirms the unspeakability of art. He doesn’t get trapped, he doesn’t stop. The awareness of success arrived in ’64 with the Venice Biennale but the path of evolution continued until his death in 2017: the artist remained an attentive and critical observer of his time and over the years an observer above all of everyday life, he entered into the objects that surround him, who looks at him and who stare at him as in the series A casa mia (2007).
Concetto Pozzati on display in Bologna
Photogallery9 foto
View
Pozzati lives “inside” things and faces them ‘hard-nosed’, as the title of one of his cycles states, and proceeding through pictorial cycles he delves into the shapes of objects, obsessively dissects them to try to get to know them better. At the same time, and he tells us this himself in the film projected at the end of the exhibition, “painting is more intelligent than us, painting has eyes, the hands that create it think and we see them create, painting is hand gymnastics, that’s all, it all happens as you do it.”
Disturbing and challenging, Concetto is naturally a philosopher but also a showman, he warns us that “painting is a lie, because the truth does not exist”. And he warns us that “the paintings look at us, the art observes us, it cannot be otherwise” subverting a classical point of view. Thus he also faces the death of his wife Roberta, with art, with the observation of his daily objects, of his things, with a series of works entitled Ciao Roberta (2007).
The pink
Academic and Councilor for Culture, intellectual and teacher Concetto Pozzati is also an icon, for his extra large physicality, like many of his works, his stature and size, the elegance of his ways and clothes. It is evident that advertising but even more so advertising graphics, which Pozzati taught from a very young age, are fundamental to his painting: the composition, the use of mass media and graphically stylized icons, the use of particular colors, such as pink, the montage and collage techniques, all this has a very close relationship with advertising graphics and posters. Pozzati’s art accelerates to slow down and perhaps at that moment he seems to conclude the work. You can feel the change of pace, between the different works, and the continuous research through the main phases of his career from the 1950s up to the intense Vulvare of 2016, in which an elderly, ill artist nearing the end of his days paints vulvas, vaginas to be born again, to be able to dream again.