Milan, at Salamon Gallery on display Antonello Viola in dialogue with Filippo Lippi

The Salamon Gallery in Milan presents, through Jan. 31, 2023, the exhibition Antonello Viola meets a painting by Filippo Lippi, which stems from the Roman artist’s careful study of a work of extraordinary lightness and power at the same time, a marvelous Madonna and Child from 1433, the only work by Filippo Lippi in the world kept in a private collection. Alongside the antique masterpiece, the exhibition displays a selection of seven previously unpublished works by Viola created on Japanese paper. This small exhibition comes only a few months after the one held at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome where, likewise, the artist’s work was in dialogue with the past. “In my artistic practice the past as well as inspiration is also an aid in stitching together and reinterpreting the present,” explains Antonello Viola.

Underlying the work is the idea that painting requires a slow processuality and that each painting calls the artist to a long-standing relationship, to a dialogue between two alterities that contaminate each other. “Viola’s works have very long, sometimes frighteningly long, chronologies of years,” Matteo Salamon points out, "so each work is a temporal segment, a portion of life.

Antonello Viola’s works are developed through a series of emblematic moments that characterize his practice: a sheet of Japanese paper of medium or small format as a beginning, a series of successive stratifications, of backgrounds and tones of color that reciprocate each other, reacting to each other and thickening the paper until it dissolves in color. It is not exactly paper, then, but this “paper-color” that is the artist’s specific medium; the landing on a final layer of gold leaf, or white gold or copper, that gives back to each work the appearance of an “almost monochrome.” A layer that closes, seals and guards, and at the same time constitutes a new beginning: only after applying it, the artist begins a meticulous process of excavation (a light excavation, which panders to the surface’s accidentalities), a new design of the work, which is realized retroactively and by scraping and delicate removal, and which lets emerge, in small areas and along the margins, the underlying layers, the material life of the painting.

Antonello Viola was born in 1966 in Rome, where he lives and works.

In 2022 he exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

2021 Vitrea, Milan Triennale, Milan. 2020 at the group show Real Utopias, a collateral event of Manifesta 13, in Marseille. Recent solo exhibitions include Antonello Viola presented by the Galleria d’art Alessandro Casciaro, Bolzano, Italy (2018), has participated in numerous institutional group exhibitions, including Looking for utopia, curated by Bianca Cerrina Feroni and Melania Rossi, Novecento, Venice (2019) and The artist / knight, curated by Joanna De Vos, Gaasbeek Castel in Flemish Brabant, Belgium (2017) Tra cielo e terra, curated by Silvia Litardi, Fondazione Carisbo, Bologna, Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2016) Experimenta, curated by Maurizio Calvesi, Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome. Farnesina Collection. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Aus der Tiefe, curated by V. Fortunati and J. Zimmerman, University of Mainz, Italian Cultural Institute.

Exhibition organized in collaboration with Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea, Rome.

Free admission.

For all information, you can call +39 02 7602 4638 or send an email to info@salamongallery.com.

Pictured: Antonello Viola, White gold moon on light green and violet.

Milan, at Salamon Gallery on display Antonello Viola in dialogue with Filippo Lippi

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