ENZO VENEZIA

15 May – 14 June 2015

Palazzo Sant’Elia, Via Maqueda 81

Palazzo Sant’Elia is the setting for the new Enzo Venezia exhibition in Palermo.
The corpus of the exhibition includes pictorial works, graphic exercises, videos, sets and installations, organized along a jagged exhibition itinerary.

Venezia writes: “I am happy to exhibit my works in sepia, which marked the origins of my work, the before of the before (until today, if not sporadically, they have never been exhibited). These works were created during a very dark period in Palermo, in the years of the mafia massacre, when the murdered were counted on the title pages of the newspapers. In them the color does not appear, as if it had been stripped away, to mark discouragement and disillusionment… but not surrender. One can easily guess how much Palermo has been not only my theater and my thematic code, but my privileged scenic generating space. I like to use its signs and metaphors. In this exhibition, the city is told through some figures who become emblems of its identity. In them there is that breath that wants to let the smells of the production of certain masters recognized by me spread out, as well as writings to which I feel bound by elective affinities (…) and again “In this journey, there are also some videos that they document my scenographic work carried out for the Theatre. I have always refused to conceive scenography as a limited “service” rendered to the show, instead I understood it as a possibility of synthesis, of giving an image to the word and to the idea that this word can animate, and this through the practice of artistic installation.”

From the text in the catalog by Emilia Valenza: “Knowing Palermo is not enough to be able to represent the “palermitudine”, Enzo knows its honesty and cruelty, degradation and pride, melancholy and cynicism, tolerance and snobbery, paradoxes and obsessions and his language, although playful but basically melancholic, between roses and babbaluci, between cassate and slaughtered lambs, between acrobats and musicians, reveals the concept of “absurd” that impassioned and poetic interpreters such as Franco Scaldati or surreal and clairvoyant like Ciprì and Maresco or carnal and seductive like Emma Dante have been able to transfuse into their “Palermite Allegories”. And it is with them that Venice has often shared his poetics.
From drawing to painting the step is far from short, although there is a direct affiliation of the second to the first, in the sense that the pictoriality of ink and watercolor drawings is the basis on which painting is formed, as is the grammar composition of the painting is all within the most exquisitely graphic work. But the step is not short, in my opinion, because the process that starts painting passes through all the other languages ​​that Enzo Venezia uses from time to time, always putting his experience of seeing in the foreground.”

The catalog is published by the Glifo Publishing House