A picnic at Fortuny

“I am a free man,” Antonio Scaccabarozzi repeatedly told his wife Anastasia Rouchota, spokesperson for his work and curator of his archive. She recounts it on the day of the opening of Diafanés at Palazzo Fortuny, as we move through the diaphanous, transparent and translucent spaces of his works, around twenty pieces selected for the Venetian occasion. The statement sounds like a key to interpretation, almost a manifesto, and seems to take physical form in the light, suspended structures that inhabit Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, Fortuny’s home.
This need for liberation – one that over time turns into a rigorous expressive coherence – can be immediately perceived in the lightness of the polypropylene structures hanging on the walls, in the translucent surfaces, and in the airy plastic stratifications that modulate architectural space and light. Scaccabarozzi’s works never impose themselves; rather, they ask to be traversed by the gaze, allowing perception to build slowly, in an active and personal way.
Quantities too have ultimately become free. Throughout his trajectory – from Concretism to analytical painting and Minimalism – Scaccabarozzi consistently pursued a progressive reduction of elements. His research tends toward the essential, yet it is never purely conceptual and never abandons the poetic, sensitive and tactile dimension.

Lines, spaces and quantities of colour thus become increasingly evanescent tools, means through which to activate what the artist defined as an “other eye”: a gaze capable of going beyond the surface, of grasping minimal variations, transparencies and shifts of light. In this sense, the work is never a finished object but an open perceptual field, completed only in relation to the viewer. “Creating a work is like having a picnic,” Scaccabarozzi used to say, as Anastasia explains with a smile. A simple, almost disarming image that conveys the idea of an artistic practice grounded in sharing and participation. In this way, reception becomes an integral part of the work: the viewer’s emotional participation is creative and becomes itself a component of the artwork.
The necessary essentiality of Scaccabarozzi’s language thus serves the deeper and experimental meaning of his work, which in the rooms of Palazzo Fortuny enters into perfect dialogue with a place historically devoted to experimentation with materials and light. Within these rooms, his Banchise find a natural placement.
Diafanés is not simply an exhibition but a perceptual experience that invites visitors to slow down, observe and allow themselves to be traversed by light, reaffirming freedom as an essential condition of art.