Renzo Calzavara is a Venetian artist who has long been living in Lombardy. His most recent studies, greatly improved when compared to his early works which date back to the ‘70s, focus entirely on geometrical shapes, which are not influenced by a sterile constructivism, but by a symbolism that merges well with his art, interpreting space and describing it in all its richness.

Thus, with artistic mastery he achieves a highly poetic result. Calzavara is a painter who has now reached artistic maturity after a long apprenticeship of group and individual exhibitions in Italy and abroad, and studies completed at the Brera Academy’s Scuola degli Artefici. Since the late ‘70s he has tried his hand at important wall paintings, which are scattered in various parts of Italy, from Calampiso to Trapani and Calvi in Umbria, and he participated in Murarte 90, held in Cadorago Lario in the Como province.
The painter Ibrahim Kodra, with whom Calzavara did a painting called “Composition C.K.” in 1998, stressed that the artist Renzo Calzavara, following figurative experiences, stands out with abstract and informal studies.

Topics such as the sun, nature and landscapes are often emphasized in his compositions as a central nucleus inside an ethereal mist of coloured clouds depicted in many gently merging shades and tones. Grids and mosaics represent the structure of his paintings, proof of the wide perspective he inherits from his Venetian origins, from love and from the Venetian culture, considering the influence Venice had in the past over that very meeting point between East and West. Nothing in his paintings is left to chance but everything is organized in a world that is not apparently figural and exists in an atmosphere of symbols and learned and refined legacies, almost the last traces of a cultured Byzantinism.

Calzavara is still working today on a highly artistic and refined study - he perceives its very essence and transfers it to the sphere of noble colours, of both extreme and rare shades. His participation in the recent exhibition we organized for the M.I.M.A.C.,
The International Marian Museum of Contemporary Art, owned by the Mons. Bello Foundation in Alessano - a junction of diverse cultures and worlds - and called Gli Occhi di Maria [The Eyes of Mary], came as quite a surprise. Invitations for the coming year, and which Calzavara has accepted, are not wanting; may it suffice to recall San Vito in art organized by the Tricase Municipality in Salento, and the Sculpture Park in San Vito Lo Capo, site of the large Sanctuary dedicated to the Saint.
Calzavara meets with success and is supported here thanks to the work of Don Piero Messana, who has reopened the Biennale of Erice, where I am foreman of the jury, and the office of “San Vito Italia”, which boasts a review of its own and cultural and historical initiatives that reach all the saint’s shrines throughout the peninsula.
The above means to explain how Calzavara’s work touches both the sacred and the profane; hence his studies reveal this gift of redesigning creation.

Translated by interpres sas