Flowers in painting between the eight and the twentieth century is the theme of the exhibition “Fiori in villa. Paintings and drawings from the Provincial Museums of Gorizia”, organized by the ERPAC – Regional publich authority for the cultural heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia and open to visitors, with free admission, until the next 2nd of June in the Barchessa di Levante of Villa Manin, in Passariano di Codroipo (Udine), Italy. Curated by Alessandro Quinzi (conservator of the Pinacoteca di Palazzo Attems Petzenstein in Gorizia), the exhibition offers to the visitor twenty paintings from the provincial museums of Gorizia, where the floral motifs are both a source of inspiration for the artist and a symbolic plot for the Opera.
“Accept my uncles, what my heart offers you, in good faith, in sign of love”. The inscription tied to the biedermeier bouquet composed of garden and field flowers is well suited to the innocent and spontaneous love of the little girl painted by Giuseppe Battig. The love which the carnation of Ignazio Furlani, a Gorizia miller, who was portrayed by Giuseppe Tominz hints at, is instead a love of spouses, and whose wealth is also documented by the citrus fruits prominently displayed on the table. Domenico Acquaroli’s woman lulls herself into sweet loving thoughts, holding a pansy and a rose with a thorny stem in her hand. At another kind of love winks the sensual look and the white rose buds of the Idle, while the flowers pinned on the collar of Giovanni Nepomuceno Favetti of Annibale Strata are an evident declaration of patriotic love. The Twentieth-century painting section opens with Franco Orlando’s The Primrose, not at ease neither with life which is changing, nor posing in front of the easel. The way the color is applied with brush strokes connects the painting with the imposing double portrait of the family of Ranieri Mario Cossar, the then director of the Musei Provinciali of Gorizia, signed by Riccardo Moritz. The essential Still-life rendered with formal sharpness by Sante Lucas refers to a female presence, not visible but perceptible. The Twentieth-century artists also rediscover flowers as an autonomous compositional motif, a direct stimulus and a sufficient pretext for painting: Attilio Fonda’s Still-life is clotted with impressionistic touches and based on blue, violet and lilac tones; Augusto Černigoj shows bright colors and a decomposition of the forms that refer to the training acquired at the Weimar Bauhaus; the Mimosas of the Venetian Renato Borsato are ethereal and impalpable; Olivia Bregant resorts to a way of painting with a pasty appearance, simplified in its forms and in the chromatic juxtaposition of cold and warm colors. Even the Azaleas and Magnolias of Gilda Nadia Goldschmied, strengthened by a more free use of color and by a greater imaginative inspiration, offer the viewer’s eyes a genuine interpretation of the beauty of flowers, “collected” and transferred to the “canvas” in the their richness of shapes and colors.
http://www.villamanin.it/le-nostre-proposte/mostre/fiori-in-villa
The Flora Journal 