Ennio Finzi (Venice 16/3/1931, 19/6/2024). From an early age interested in painting and music. After attending courses for a brief period at the Institute of Art in Venice, he became attracted to the discovery of cubist structural disarrangement, which allowed him to transcend the representation of given reality.
After the 1948 Biennale, the Historic Archives of the Contemporary Arts in Venice reopened, offering Finzi the chance to dedicate himself to the study of masters of avant-garde movements in history. Meeting Atanasio Soldati, who spent a period of time in Venice, stimulated Finzi and probably influenced subsequent works characterized by bright chromatics and rigorous formal symmetry.
In this way Finzi’s first “inventions” were born rhythm, colour, light and tone became fundamental elements and formed the basis of his research. In that period Virgilio Guidi and the ideological strength of his creative thought, and Emilio Vedova, with his strong brushstrokes that attacked the surface, also exerted a strong influence on Finzi.
The discovery of dodecaphonic music led Finzi to seize the principle of “dissonance”. Then suddenly, in the same way, the praxis of colour dissolved of any shading and having the exclusive function of tone opened new and wide horizons. From that moment until the late 1950s his work became an obsessive search for the semantics of brush stroke, light and tone. The colour sound relationship, a colour that Finzi loved to “listen to” more than “to see” in its most intimate resonance, allowed him to express himself freely under different and altogether rules.
At the end of the 1950s (years marked by the remarkable insight of Lucio Fontana, whom Finzi met in Milan on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Apollinaire Gallery) the gestured turbulence and expressive urgency of Finzi’s work became calm and expressed a more reflective dimension. It was the path of superseding painting itself and moving closer to gestalt theories on the phenomenology of perception. Up until 1978 the principles of optical art informed his research on optical effects, due to the phenomenon of the retinal conservation of images. After a short crisis following an exhaustion of interest in the principles of structural visual.
Finzi with renewed energy and enthusiasm in 1980 yielded to the rediscovery of the immediacy of painting. Once again he began exploring fascinating themes relating to colour, and went beyond the dissonance of the 1950s. Painting again became the dominant space with colour and non - colour, light and shade successively alternating and competing on the surface of the work. Black was used as the light of the dark, of emptiness, of silence, and led him to probe the most secret reso¬nance of non-existence in the invisibility of painting itself. In the continuing dialectics that counter-distinguishes the principle of his research.
Finzi proceeds in successive stages of development characterized by greater chromatic sumptuousness and sudden elimination of luminosity in which energy is concentrated in a potential state. This incessant questioning of working style makes him foreign to any preconceived stylistic form and gives him the professional label of “non-style”: Through the experience of experience, Finzi continually follows the dream of surprise in painting with a stress on constant regeneration and catharsis.
In more recent years he retakes connotations that are rooted in painting and colour, but these connotations are no longer inhibited by ideologically closed regimes; the artist retakes with an abandon that is completely open and available to the totality of feeling which is painting.
For the eighty years of Finzi between 2010 and 2011 the exhibitions: at Villa Contarini in Piazzola sul Brenta, from 19/12/2010 to 25/04/2011 "From black to no color" and in Castelfranco Veneto at the Academic Theatre Gallery, "Pathology of the expression" from 12/02 to 27/03/2011.
Ennio Finzi has refused the invitation from the Italian Pavilion of the 54. Venice Biennale 2011, Veneto Pavilion, at Villa Contarini in Piazzola sul Brenta (PD).
The events continued over the years. Ennio Finzi died in Venice on 19/6/2024.
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