Saturday 7th October 2023, LABS Contemporary Art is pleased to present Beautiful Life, the solo show of Claudio Verna curated by Davide Ferri. The exhibition includes mostly paintings from 2000s, punctuated by some works from 70s, i.e. from the period when Verna was one of the major figures in Analytical Painting.

 

However Beautiful Life does not have claim to be exhaustive, but in an inevitably partial way, it covers a wide span of time, a research for a lifetime, ideally between two extremities: the 70s, that are one of the most important time for the artist’s research and his recent work, capable of express a renewed vitality and quality that belong to Verna’s painting since his beginnings: the pulsing and vibratile relationship between geometry - whose lines and surface marks derive through emanation from the painting as object, as body, considered in its materiality - and color, a color that can counters this geometry, or pointing out, but making its boundaries porous and perpetually unstable.

The ability of color to explore the surface in all its parts, in the middle as well as the margins, organized in bands and lines that follow and contrast the perimeter and the shape of the painting. A sort of agility of the color, which translates in the succession and articulation between planes and layers, that have built the image, with colors that seem emerging on the surface, squaring and dotting the dominant field. As in Beautiful Life, the painting of which the title of the exhibition derives, a white “almost monochrome” whose surface is  contaminated by an infinity of undertones that make it vibrate by contrast or by fading and increasing of intensity.

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