Riva del Garda Museum pays tribute to Luciano Ventrone, the Caravaggio of the 20th century, one year after his death

From April 13 to June 12, 2022, the MAG Museo Alto Garda in Riva del Garda will celebrate the painting of Luciano Ventrone, one year after the artist’s death on April 13, 2021, with a monographic exhibition organized in collaboration with Il Cigno GG Edizioni-Roma and the Luciano Ventrone - Miranda Gibilisco Foundation. The brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi and Lorenzo Zichichi and curated by Marco di Capua, the exhibition entitled Luciano Ventrone. Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühn? refers to one of the painter’s most represented and beloved subjects and at the same time strongly identifying with the Garda territories.

More than thirty works will be on display to trace Ventrone’s artistic activity from the 1960s, still a student at the Faculty of Architecture and which he later abandoned to devote himself solely to painting, to his latest works dated 2016 and 2018. So from his beginnings as a classical figurative artist to geometric experimentation, passing through informal and programmed art, until Ventrone found his mark and matured his aesthetic research also thanks to the interest of Federico Zeri, who induced him to tackle the theme of still lifes.

The Caravaggio of the 20th century, as he was called by Zeri, Ventrone managed to amaze with his virtuosity and the anatomical perfection of his fruits and flowers. It is a painting made of immanent light and hyperbole in the rendering of details, thanks in part to the use of photography that Ventrone used in his creative process. He thus obtained hyperrealistic and illusionistic representations not of the subjects themselves, but of a neo-platonic idea-form, leading the viewer to reflect on theeternal dualism between reality and appearance, absence and presence, and the ultimate meaning of artistic creation.

“The artist,” Sgarbi comments, “seems to seek an absolute, an essence, an entelechy that, in the work, grows reality, does not merely reproduce it. It is more. Ventrone is the painter of hyperbole.”

For more info: www.museoaltogarda.it

Image: Luciano Ventrone, Un’altra storia (2000; oil on mixed media on linen canvas)

Riva del Garda Museum pays tribute to Luciano Ventrone, the Caravaggio of the 20th century, one year after his death

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