White pages

It was described as a “blank page” what Gastone Novelli (1925–1968) brought to Venice in 1964, invited to the XXXII edition of the Biennale di Venezia with a solo room. Swimming against the tide of Pop Art’s chromatic explosion and the object-based materiality of New Dada arriving forcefully from overseas, the ten paintings selected from his most recent works also stood out for their original display: hung in a C-shape, they guided the viewer’s gaze through a kind of mountainous and hilly landscape, ideally illuminated by blazing suns and silvery moons. Minimalist in its rigor, with only a few calibrated “bursts of color,” Novelli’s work marked a return to painting in order to “tell a physical fact,” a natural space, a time distant from the present; to set imagination in motion, where language became a verb engraved into the canvas until it fossilized, its chromatic harmonies recomposed like ancient remains. Even more “subversive” was his participation in the 1968 Biennale, with twelve paintings, a sculpture, and a site-specific work. On that occasion he chose to turn the canvases face to the wall, writing on their backs “La Biennale è fascista” (“The Biennale is fascist”) in protest against the arrest of students demonstrating in the Giardini di Castello, ultimately removing the works from the exhibition in the following days. One hundred years after his birth, Ca’ Pesaro devotes a major exhibition to the artist, on view until March 1, focusing on the Informal experiments of the 1950s and extending to the more radical and political works produced in the late 1960s. Around sixty masterpieces of elegance and painterly refinement, presented in chronological order, reveal how in a remarkably concentrated span of time Novelli engaged with and developed the most urgent themes of those years, skillfully weaving restrained linguistic citations with overt political references.

A source of pride for Ca’ Pesaro’s permanent collection and a testament to Novelli’s deep bond with Venice, where he had moved in 1967, is the bequest arranged by his family, who donated two masterpieces to the museum, perfectly integrated into the collections and representative of the two extremes of his production. Era glaciale (1958) “is part of Novelli’s intimate yet universal diary, a narrative written with new signs on new supports,” as Elisabetta Barisoni notes in the catalogue: matter and paint, collage and mixed media, incised and flaking wall surfaces in continuous dialogue with the materiality of Alberto Burri. A hymn to white as a regenerative force, a source of renewal and spiritual elevation. Allunga il passo, amico mio (“Lengthen Your Stride, My Friend”), a kind of lagoon horizon barely suggested by a thin line stretching across five meters, stands as a tribute-message to his friend Vittorio Carrain of the Ristorante All’Angelo, where ten years earlier the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti had been founded. An exhortation not to give up, but to persist in experimentation and provocation, which art, more than any other language, carries within it.

Featured image: Gastone Novelli, Per ricordare la vita, 1959 © MUVE