In the church of S. Cristoforo, by now also a cultural centre of the Municipality of Lodi, and with the support of the Department of Culture and the Province, an anthological exhibition is being staged dedicated to the works of artist, Vito Melotto, a major figure of Italian art in the post-war period.

The exhibition is entitled “La visione preziosa nella vicenda artistica di Vito Melotto” (Precious vision in the artistic life of Vito Melotto) and the catalogue includes a critical text by colleague Mauro Corradini investigating in detail the last twenty years of activity of this Veneto artist adopted by the city of Milan.

Large and small paintings narrating the story of an artist who, around images - realist painting first and colour research later on - has founded a career revealing those characteristic aspects of the farming world, of that world from which he came and in which he has retraced the strong values of pietas, humanitas, and above all the prophetic signs of a number of cultural situations stemming from it. Melotto’s images found strength in figures which, during the course of time, depicted indoors and outdoors, revealed their centrality and brought to the fore through gestures, actions and attitudes, a crude humanity, but also a return to the origins of human feelings, almost the expression of a memory in which, beyond existential unease, matter becomes the expression of a beating heart and the colour of the mind. Melotto’s faces are not only a scientific analysis of their nature, in which light triumphs between shapes and volumes, but also reveal, besides their antiquity, that quest for symbols suspended in a space without frontiers, or the sense of shapes that implode in the fragmentation of parts and shades-colours as if they were part of a glass window. Meanwhile the images reveal their simplicity, an existential urgency like loneliness but also like a question, and sometimes even serenity by way of the tonalities that in recent years have marked a declaratory stage of poetics. Vito Melotto’s artistic career thus starts in the post-war years, in the early-fifties of last century and develops up to the present through a sequence of researches, colour intonations, signs that not only outline the things, objects and images which have been represented, but also the scenario that lies behind them. This scenario, first of all depicted by brush strokes is now as if reconstructed, itself creating a network of colours, presenting itself almost like abstract painting. Matter and colour are transformed, but the ideas, ideals and thoughts that are at the bottom of his poetics like a “precious vision”, are still very pertinent to the new view of the world presented by the artist. An all-Italian painting harmonised with French artistic reminiscences, not least the influence, first of all, of Cezanne and today of Manessier, but which spins a thread linking it to the great Veneto tone painting and to certain aspects of 15th-cent. painting, especially those landscape backgrounds to be seen on some parts of the canvas, beyond what first strikes the eye, beyond the glass of open and closed windows. Vito Melotto has always pursued that private and family, domestic and peasant world. In it he has performed his research, focused entirely on colour and tone, thus declining the so-called periods, when light has worked on the images, once colder and darker, now brighter and warmer. Highly prestigious, public and private exhibitions have made his name known in several parts of Italy and won him significant awards which have explored and rewarded his colours, his poetics, his strength and his technique. A long tale this painting, a tale started with living life, pursuing legends and fantasy, pursuing memories and hopes, providing his shapes, figures, still-lifes, objects and sacred images with a sort of unreal-reality, thereby bringing the language of art close to a message of humanity. This exhibition restores to his life as an Italian painter, the mysterious and dynamic detail of a process where colour becomes the redeeming preciousness of his world and articulates the space of his representations like an infinite itinerary of visual knowledge. (traslated by Interpres)