It is a tangle of reality, imagination and radicalism, life, death and technology, microcosms and metamorphoses, nature and introspection. Until July 27, the Calarota Foundation is hosting at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice two retrospectives (both curated by Roberta Perazzini Calarota) dedicated to two artists connected by their distinct visionary approach and a «bittersweet» poetic sensibility. Indeed, «Bittersweet» is the title of the exhibition dedicated to the enigmatic creations of Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), one of the leading innovators of 20th-century British painting. Often referred to as the Damien Hirst of his time, Sutherland's style synthesizes expressionist, abstract, cubist, and surrealist influences from continental Europe, reinterpreted through a vivid biomorphic imagination.
The exhibition presents 40 works from the artist’s mature production, where naturalistic impressions coexist with an existential dimension: gnarled forms and roots in Twisted Tree (1973), miniature universes in Conglomerate (1970), the symbolic Egg (1975) suggesting latent transformation, and the imaginative Sirens (1979). The exhibition culminates in The Bestiary (1979), one of Sutherland’s most renowned cycles, presented here in its entirety. From serpents to octopuses, these aquatint etchings, created to accompany texts by Apollinaire, represent a compendium of Sutherland’s art, perpetually suspended between joy and anguish, capturing the essence of human existence.
Equally disconcerting are the visions of Mattia Moreni (1920-1999), the subject of the retrospective «Objects Things Think in Silence», which greets visitors with the grotesque canvas «Ah! That Freud… “Psychoanalysis on the Couch” (1997)», epitomizing the fervent gesture and potent emotional charge of his multifaceted talent. On display are 35 paintings, some of which in large-format, dense with matter and painterly intensity, tracing Moreni’s artistic trajectory across the avant-gardes.
From Fauvist-expressionist beginnings to post-cubist solutions, through abstract-concrete forms developed during his association with the Group of the Eights, Moreni later embraced Informalism and Neo-expressionism. Palazzo Franchetti also features his iconic Watermelons, a cycle presented in his personal exposition at the 1972 Venice Biennale: metaphorical depictions of the wounded woman, the origin of the world, and its decay. The climax of the exhibition is a selection of Humanoids, the final phase of Moreni’s production: computer-like faces, acidic hues, violent fluorescences, and obsessive «whys?». One wonders how Moreni might have interpreted the age of AI with his paintbrush.