Giovanni Barbisan (Treviso 1914 - Orbetello 1988) in 1931, at the age of eighteen, he enrolled in the free nude courses of De Stefani
at Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. Later he attented the course of decoration with Guido Cadorin and printmaking techniques with Giovanni Giuliani.
Barbisan remains essentially autonomous and focused on a spirit
strongly self-taught; not be ruled out, there is also the influence exerted by
works by Antonio Donghi, that Barbisan must have seen at the Biennale
1932. In the same year it is his first exhibition and the following year
Giovanni Barbisan to the graphic signs showed oil painting at the Ninth Art Show Treviso.
In 1935 Barbisan purchased from Giuliani a press paid 350 lire. The press, purchased in Venice, will be his home at the first Treviso center of engraving. This place will become the fulcrum for many young people with the passion of engraving.
In 1937 two other events are reported some relief of his biographical path: the
conclusion of military service, but three years later in other situations he would be involved and the beginning to teach in Venice art school, with responsibility for the landscape, with discontinuity until 1971. The landscape is in fact one of the dominant leitmotif of Giovanni Barbisan production: deeply attached to his Veneto land, he paints with retract dedication the beloved hills of Asolo, the Treviso countryside, the natural elements marked by the rhythm of the seasons.
In the last two decades of his activity, Giovanni Barbisan devoted himself particularly to the Tuscan countryside and wild solitude of Maremma. He died in Orbetello, in Maremma, which he loved like a second more rugged Venetian countryside. It happened suddenly, on June 17, 1988: Barbisan had just finished an extraordinary impact vertical slab, a forest and he seemed anxious to go home and to give it to the presses. By a curious but significant fate, his work as an engraver accompanies him until the last day of his life.
Giovanni Barbisan is less labels among Venetian painters: he does not belong to the generation before the war, nor after the war. His time is a reinterpretation of the museum, in the sense of an attentive cultural filter that settles the subject of the painting to remove it from the contingency to eliminate all its dross. In fact he is enclosed in a microcosm, that is his living cell: an old house buried in the countryside. The subjects are precisely those families: the sun between the leaves, embroidery of the grass, the peel of a pomegranate, dried flowers.
An ancient light surrounds these small things. An intimate art. A Veneto Dutch of 1600, but at the same time the Venetismo comes back as a sentimental abandom of Giorgione.
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