Antoni Clavé. Alchimia della materia

Antoni Clavè (Barcelona 1913 - Saint Tropez 2005), is among the most interesting artists on which will turn the spotlight during the 56. Venice Biennale. It is in fact the star of a major retrospective organized by the Art Gallery of Greater Bologna at the magnificent spaces of Scoletta of Battioro, on the Grand Canal. Among the leading figures of the last century, Clavè is a highly versatile artist able to discard unexpected and inexhaustible complexity, a curious spirit and always turned to experimentation. This exhibition aims to highlight the continuing challenge to traditional artistic processes operated by Clave for the whole of his career, moving through the various productions of the artist.

Few artists in the twentieth century have succeeded, as Antoni Clavè, to combine high artistic and intellectual consistency with unquenched tendency to experiment. And it is this unit, in complexity, to be the protagonist of the exhibition organized during the 56. Biennale di Venezia. Established by the large bronze sculpture, "Guerrier et bouclier", on display will oils in homage to the great master Greek, along with the trials of the 70 mixed technique, with the use of collage and reliefs on leaf ' aluminum and the great paintings of the 90s. If the sculpture's theme is the human figure - a warrior, the last heir of a vanished civilization, a composition full of mystery and yet imbued with irony - the works of the '70s go, literally, with no traces of the objects that make up the everyday life of the artist. It continues with the homage to Greek, repeated in variations always different, like a leitmotif or ancestry that pervades its production. Is seen as Clave is taken into a rewrite of their influences, as it is capable of precisely the example of the masters, because he too teacher. In more recent works, large oil paintings, the figuration is lost, diluitasi never lost in a gesture of painting, in which we put collage and intersect different techniques: every decade opens in new experiments, each sheet is taken by the artist as a means to know and express the world. Vu à Vicky Street, with its red - color symbol for those who know the artist's work - presents a gesture not furious, but driven by an instinctive artistic thought, where the brush marks the lines of the world and thought. In these works, the large size, relive elements and influences that have pervaded the entire career of Clave, its night colors, its ability to bring together the matter with the intellect, the world with his artistic sublimation, the historical tradition with the discoveries of his trips, like the one made in the 80s in New York, where he discovered the walls, posters, graffiti that become part of the artwork.
Never before in Clave we see an application of what Henri Focillon called "poetry of action"; if there were to be a confirmation that the mind takes shape through the hands and the hands are the shape of the soul of the artist, the artist's production would be the decisive document, a eulogy of the hand, to quote the words of the critic French. In Clave, the gesture is the continuation of thought, organization of chaos, a call that the artist never abdicates, until the end of his career. Clavé investigates, therefore, the bottom of the reality with objects, with the tools or with an idea and rediscovers there the grace that is shown in the disruptive disorder: so the light spots and bits of red light that flashes of unexpected tones brown , black, gray and Prussian blue, like stars. A generous production and impetuous, full of twists and made of bold experimentation with many impulses toward the new and the unusual, all filtered by the memory of the warm homeland.

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