Santi Alleruzzo at SpazioA

Artist: Santi Alleruzzo

Exhibition title: All Life Long

Venue: SpazioA, Pistoia, Italy

Date: June 10 – July 29, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SpazioA

SpazioA is proud to present on Friday June 10, 2016, 6 pm, All LIfe Long, the first solo show by Santi Alleruzzo (Messina, 1929 – Villa San Giovanni, 2006), at the gallery on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the artist’s passing.

The fruit of an archiving and rereading of Santi Alleruzzo’s work that took more than a year to complete, the show consists of small and medium size paintings on panel or canvas done mostly between 1975 and 1985 that represent the artist at his full maturity.

The works on display illustrate a number of aspects that define Alleruzzo’s poetic: his absolute fidelity to a certain landscape – the Strait of Messina – from which the artist never strayed; the network of personal relations and exchanges that refutes the idea of a secluded or solitary artist; recurring motifs and themes: the shores on both sides of the Strait, the sea, the horizon, the wharves and beaches, the bathers and the footballers, the still lifes with lemons, the windows and the blinds, the ferries and boats in motion, and the moving cars and trains that hardly ever correspond to compact series but tend instead to develop in parallel and along extended timelines – sometimes overlapping and mingling into one another; and the description of the bustling, restless life of the Strait through several of its most emblematic elements: horizontal bands that evoke the scene’s natural conformation (the land, the sea, the breakwaters, the deeper sea beyond, more land, the sky) in forces and lines running horizontally across the paintings.

In the course of his activity, from an apparently marginal position Santi Alleruzzo formulated his own cultured, updated but prudent idea of figuration never overly lyrical but instead calmly visionary, at times even chaste, which by means of subtraction and isolation closely approached abstraction, an abstraction that is always under the surface and seems to be on the point of emerging in some paintings more than others.

A catalog designed by Riccardo Falcinelli with around sixty photos of the artist’s work and a critique by the show’s curator, Davide Ferri will be presented at the show.