The energy of light by Bacci at the Guggenheim in Venice – Veneto

(ANSA) – VENICE, MARCH 30 – “For me this exhibition represents a return home of Edmondo Bacci, to the home of Peggy Guggenheim, a sensitive and rare collector, who had intuited how, behind such a shy and shy figure, which was Bacci, a great artist was hidden. She was the first to understand that the energy of the color of her works was something special, unique”.

The curator Chiara Bertola thus summarizes the exhibition dedicated to one of the protagonists of the Venetian art scene, like Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom the collector and patron, who moved permanently to the lagoon city in 1949, decided to support through the purchase of works and to bring to the attention of the world with exhibitions and donations to international museums.

About eighty works by Bacci, partly unpublished, are at the center of the exhibition scheduled in the exhibition spaces of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, from April 1st to September 18th (Marsilio Arte catalogue), within the Collection’s program of exhibitions – he underlines the director Karole PB Vail – aimed at celebrating the protagonists of the Italian art scene after the Second World War, such as Capogrossi, Fontana, Licini, Tancredi himself and now Bacci. “The energy of light” accompanies the name of the artist (1913-1978) in the title of the exhibition: “Bacci painted light, that light which for him was the significance of things”, says the curator.

The exhibition brings to the attention of the general public one of the protagonists of Venetian painting, in particular of the Spatialism movement, to which he joined in 1953, before opening up to new experiments in his last years of activity, who had great notoriety during his lifetime and then “inexplicably slipped into a gray area”. “Edmondo Bacci’s works – highlights Francesca Lavazza – express his ability to represent the light of the world, and the inner light that resides in things and in man”.

The itinerary of the exhibition – centered in particular on the Fifties, those of the solo room at the Biennale in 1958 (partly reconstructed in the exhibition) – opens with some black and white works from the “Cantieri” and “Fabbriche” series, between 1945 and 1953 inspired by the industrial center of Marghera. Immediately, however, color and light and space burst forth with “Albe”, from 1954, to then arrive at “Avvenimenti” where color and light create vortexes, primordial explosions, infinite spaces and abysses.

Works, the latter, where “space is no longer supported by a geometric grid but is generated solely by the relationships of color events. A color – says the curator – which becomes absolute space and which abolishes any limit between surface and volume, between dimension and trajectory: the becomes pure matter of light in its gradual liberation from the heavier matter of the informal”.

If the experimental works of the 1960s and 1970s are surprising, the section dedicated to the drawings, in fact unpublished, from the artist’s collections and archives is particularly interesting. Closing the itinerary is a painting by Giambattista Tiepolo, The Final Judgment (about 1730-35), testifying how Bacci was influenced by the masters of the past, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and above all by Tiepolo’s spatiality and skies. (HANDLE).