From May to June, Credito Valtellinese Group Gallery is hosting painter Roberto Floreani's important personal exhibition, which is inspired by Ezra Pounds's "Cantos".

Ezra Pound's memory is to Roberto Floreani's painting as Mary De Rachewiltz's writing (the poet's daughter, who was a writer and a poet too) is to a cultured and complex painting that drew some of its main motivations from Pound. Rachewiltz's foreword to the catalogue is like a new form of language. It is not art criticism, not poetry, not literature but a lyrical digressing in the field of the arts.

Roberto Floreani's works are exclusively paintings. He is one of the few Italian artists of his generation who believe in the formal and narrative abilities of a both traditional and continuously renewed discipline. He elaborated a painting experience made of symbolic shapes, apparently abstract, within an expressive web, where technical knowledge, strong conceptual intentions and archetypal "narration" concentrate.

The exhibition entitled "Memory" has been purposely conceived for the Gallery. It includes approximately forty works subdivided into five sections. The first one includes eight big paintings and ten small photographs. The second one - the Regno di Mezzo - includes a dozen papers, where writing (even if partially cancelled) prevails. The third section - Dove sta Memoria - includes ten diptychs that combine small pictures with photographs recalling Pound's thematic of the "Earth memory" (the eucalyptus seed) and "Sea memory" (the nautilus, the shell). The fourth one includes only a big diptych on canvas - Cinque tratti di mare - (120x400 cm) combined with five photographs. A series of ten paintings summarizing the author's thematic concludes the exhibition.

All paintings are characterised by skilful white veils, which seem to represent a hiding procedure, a deprivation procedure. It is therefore a sort of becoming immaterial, of visual mystical practice. The picture contents are what you can see and what is hidden, at the same time, offering different interpretations.

Floreani has been thinking over the contrary vitality for years. Contraries are an open subject, constantly developed, affecting both the art of painting and its meaning. Painting and literature, matter and inspiration, hints and quotations are no more clearly separated. They have a sole, all-comprehensive interpretation.

"Memory" collects and shows works by an artist who painted his abstract origins, giving shape to poetry. Spaces and signs made painting be a sort of symbolic figuration that emphasises poetic images, memory, dreams. Such a symbolic figuration challenges the matter. Photography, developed in diptychs next to painting, dares an even more abstract transfiguration, sometimes painfully and ostentatiously true.

Roberto Floreani was born in Venice, in 1956, and lives in Vicenza. In Italy, he has been supporting his personal view of the art for years. His conception is based on the respect of painting, because, in his opinion, it reflects the principles of an ethical discipline. Floreani, in fact, constantly exercises the oriental martial arts, in order to manifest such an ethical discipline. In recent years, Roberto Floreani showed his works in important exhibitions, hosted in museums and in private galleries, both in Italy and abroad. As a few examples, we can mention the exhibition entitled "Sogno d'acqua" (Milan, Gariboldi Gallery, 1992), a cycle of four personal exhibitions mounted between 1991 and 1993 in Germany and Sweden, "La casa e il tempo" (Contemporary Art Museums of Como, Ravenna, Zagreb, 1994), "L'età della conoscenza" (Parma, Niccoli Gallery, 1996), "Vedute" (Antonio Colombo; Contemporary Art, '99). He also participated in several collective exhibitions, among which "Titanica" (Modern Art Gallery of Saint Marino, 1995), "Ultime acquisizioni" (Bologna, Modern Art Gallery, 1998), "Arte Italiana - Pittura Aniconica" (Bologna, Modern Art Gallery, 1998). He is moreover represented in important public collections and museum collections (e.g. PAC in Milan, Modern Art Gallery in Bologna, Banca Commerciale Italiana, ING Bank, and Credito Valtellinese). The brochure available is published by Skira and includes texts by Mary De Rachewiltz, Danilo Eccher and Beatrice Buscaroli.

For further information:
Credito Valtellinese Group Gallery
Phone: 02.48008015

Public transport to the Gallery:
Underground MM Cadorna, Tram 24 and 19, bus 94

Press office:
Irma Bianchi Comunicazione - Via Arena 16/1 - 20123 Milan
Phone 02.89404694 - 02.89400732 Fax 02.8356467; Email: irbiam@tin.it

Email: creval@creval.it