Carmelo Zotti (Trieste 1933 - Treviso, 2007).
Before arriving in Venice, he spent his childhood in Trieste and Naples. His training took place at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice with Bruno Saetti.
He taught painting at the Academy of Venice from 1973 to 1990.
Among the major awards: first prize in the 1954 at Opera Bevilacqua La Masa, the first appearance of 1956 at the Venice Biennale in 1958 with three paintings and the first prize at the Biennale Internazionale of youth and the Longo Award at the XXXII Biennale Internazionale of Venice .
Paolo Rizzi he wrote: "I pick a leaf torn and lying on the ground, in bringing home studio of Carmelo Zotti in countryside of San Dona di Piave. I read: "Ganymede to Olympus is an intruder, it is an elephant in Rome, a phoenix it is in India and usually we prefer things that there are more foreign and come from greater distances. The incomplete sentence is Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Here are the key to understanding the painting Zotti, which dwells in this experience of 'foreign', ie of the unknown.
Zotti, mature style, sure of himself risen to a prestigious professorship of painting at Venice, made the stock of its past experience and has chosen dived voluptuously in the "mysterious sea” enigma of De Chirico and browse for new beaches on which to set his mind exhausted but lucid. The wrecks of such a journey ("is a wake from sleep," he said Mallarmé) are before me: the sphinx, the elephant, the sarcophagus, the pyramid, the fountain, signs, signals and caught a hyper reality fished through the symbol, allegory, transposition fantastic. The picture is an electric field in which these carriers arcane lock in a pensive immobility that is "pending", and immediately placed the relics of the psyche become entangled with each other, become entangled, they enter into one another, creating a series of connections of unstable liquid ratios. One is puzzled, as if "reading" we escape: the eyes of the mind (not unlike the physiological mechanism of astigmatism) can not focus the image, which is itself clear and precise. This Zotti process clearly has distant matrices. Sinks in the land, explored by some Nordic romanticism (from Blacke and Fuseli down to Blockin and early De Chirico) and French symbolism (Redon), was the same field investigation of the Surrealists and especially Ernst.
... Zotti's painting appears to me as a witness painful torn: it is the result of an unstable equilibrium between external reality and inner reality, between bare proposition of 'space' physical object and its recreation through the mechanism of unfathomable psyche. You can imagine the torment of the artist trying to reconcile these two worlds, always careful to reveal the truth opposed. What "means" for us the elephant? Or it seems that the sphinx turn into flesh? Or tap the fountain? Or the sarcophagus that opens to show a Lazarus does not rise? Zotti uses a repertoire between archaeology and exoticism, where, in a timeless space, memories resurface and suggestions of distant Mediterranean myth, revised through the veil of culture. As in the Eelefante Celebes” of Ernst or “bagni misteriosi” of De Chirico, he collects and interprets the conflicting motives, without falling in the activity" paranoiac critical "of Dali, but soaring objects in a rarefied dimension in which float in an ideal essence.
Archeology discovery joins the protruding tumor, swelling vitality of organic matter - plant, and the explicit presence of the urn Greek or Egyptian sphinx overlaps perhaps the memory of a "masked man" who does not know if it reappears comics of the 30s and irreverent irony of a De Chirico today. In this play, of course, taste ambiguous, that is, as we know, one of the specific components of the current trends Neo Surreal. Zotti's paintings become continually insisting on the ground of a refined cruelty anthropomorphism taken to the extreme, where nature is charged with an animism panic and latent sexual charge becomes vital, bursting strength and obscure".
In 2009 Venice tributes to Carmelo Zotti, a year after his death, with a "dpuble" exhibition: a retrospective at the Museo Correr and a second exhibition devoted to his students (Zotti taught at the Academy of Venice from 1967 to 1990) at Magazzini del Sale in Zattere.
In 2012 the exhibition "Zotti. Opere scelte" from 21/01 to 28/03 at Castel Sismondo in Rimini.
On 2013 from 21/04 to 30/06 the city of Treviso dedicates to Maestro Carmelo Zotti (Trieste 1933 - Italy 2007) an exhibition, in the year that he would have been eighty years: "Zotti. 50 anni di pittura".
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