With the support of the Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities of the Piedmont Region and the National Contemporary Art Institute, an exhibition is being staged in Turin, in the famous Palazzo Granari, rich in 19th-cent. historical memories, dedicated to one of Italy’s foremost and internationally renowned artists.

This exhibition is entitled, “Riccardo Licata – Gli arazzi” (Riccardo Licata - The tapestries). On show will be about thirty large works, made in recent years and accompanied by drawing on paper, which represent the preparatory drafts. This is a milestone exhibition along the itinerary of events dedicated in this period to the Italian artist, who lives between Venice and Paris. The artist was born in 1929, in Turin. Later his family moved to Rome where he lived until 1945. In 1946, he moved again, this time to Venice where, between 1947 and 1955 he studied in the city’s renowned Academy. In 1957, he was already the assistant, in Paris, of Gino Severini, one of the great artists belonging to the Italian Ecole in the French capital. In this city, he achieved major successes and occupied the post of professor of engravings and mosaics in major public institutions.
His works have appeared in major museums throughout the world, exhibitions in leading institutions and cities, and Quadriennials, Triennials and Biennials, starting with that of Venice up to 1952. The history of Licata’s art is of such integrity and professionalism that his stylistic characteristics, his poetics are perhaps the only ones today that testify to the antique and modern history of the world, where writing, signs and calligraphy are to some extent the history of mankind and civilisation.
Licata’s symbols and traces have travelled the world and it was only right that an exhibition like this one, which is accompanied by a prestigious catalogue published by Verso L’Arte Edizioni with texts by Carlo Franza, Giovanni Granzotto, Dino Marangon, Leonardo Conti, Giovanna Barbero and Riccardo Licata, should represent a departure point for others that will take the tapestries and his works to the Exhibition Building in Rome, to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Arezzo, to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Nice, to the Albertina in Vienna and, in 2004, as far as the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Meanwhile, Licata has not only used but has mastered different artistic methods, from oil on canvas, to tempera on paper, to water-painting, engravings, lithographs, frescos, ceramics, glass, mosaics and now, even tapestries.
Everything responded to him quietly, everything adapted to his creativity, everything strengthened within that inner quest that outlined an “expressive code”, as the artist himself says. The woollen wall, as the tapestry has been called, made by Riccardo Licata, has conveyed a sense of newness to tapestry making, an art that failed to attract much attention in the 20th century. Tapestry-making, that great medieval art, by no means a minor art, has made a comeback and achieved new heights in the past twenty-five years, thanks to artists such as Mastroianni, Messagier, Turcato, Clavé, Fazzini, Fabbri, Pignon, Santomaso, Corpora, Cagli, Afro and many others. Today Licata, who has made the largest number of tapestries, knotted in silk, kilim, using Dupuis’ piquage method, and others of equal importance and value, creates with a language that is always new and old at the same time and with a musicality of harmonies and balances.
Large and small tapestries, some size 154 x 209 cm, vertical and horizontal, made in part together with Alain Dupuis and the German manufacturer Wissenbach, reveal refined workmanship, based on sketches, drawings and board models and are, as the exhibition shows, circles full of magic. This exhibition thus reveals the multifaceted work of an artist who, unlike many others, has never craved for ephemeral glory, but has focused all his efforts on highlighting the specificity of materials and artistic means used to signify the skeleton of the world and things, pursuing myths and symbols, occasions tied to classical history.
Behind the deep excavation of these signs, placed on fabric, paper, mosaics, sculpted or even, as in this exhibition, entrusted to tapestries, all the utopia of an artist appears who imagines himself recreating a new world, still tied to dreams and myths.

Translated by Interpres Sas