In the historic borgo Casamale in Somma Vesuviana, amidst medieval walls and late Renaissance reconstructions, Contemporary Art continues to find a space to astonish. After a succession of artists, with both installation and wall works, this is the turn of Vittorio Valiante – a Neapolitan painter born in ’91 – to confront culture and history. Mātĕr-ĭa is the site-specific work he is presenting, created thanks to Tramandars, a multidisciplinary movement for conveying art and culture in public spaces, and Amici del Casamale, a social promotion association that is very active in the area.
Vittorio Valiante, Mater-ia, artworks, 2023, Somma Vesuviana, courtesy Tramandars and the Artist, photo Iannone Giuseppe
In the multifunctional space Hub-Side, located in the hypogeum of Chiesa Collegiata in Santa Maria Maggiore, Valiante unites the sacred and the communal, the intimate and the collective, investigating the theme of motherhood. The confrontation with Vesuvian history and culture, the dialogue with the people and Elisa Perillo’s curatorship, allowed the artist to create a work that manages to unite pictorial contemporaneity and religious traditionality. The mother, beautiful, pure, vulnerable, weighed down by time and sacrifice. An icon susceptible to honest and related feelings: Marian mother, common mother. For Vittorio Valiante, the pictorial decomposition of the female body is a way of investigating the multitude of meanings and emotions that are always recognisable, but which, indeed, when seen in their close-up, penetrate the heart and mind. Like fragments of life, the paintings induce the viewer to feel even more inside a shared and universal love. A womb is the result of the union of colour with the threads of red cloth sprinkled within the space, dense and narrative as only earthly or spiritual life can generate.
Vittorio Valiante, Mater-ia, installation view, 2023, hub space, Somma Vesuviana, courtesy Tramandars and the Artist, photo Iannone Giuseppe
The works created for this exhibition are in addition to others created last summer by Valiante as a contemporaryisation of and homage to the late 15th-century altarpiece by Angelillo Arcuccio in the same church. This is a profound and moving reflection that unites the intimate dimension with the creed of a community. With no time or space, Vittorio Valiante speaks to the observer because he can share his mother’s emotional experience and perceive its gracefulness. Thanks to Tramandars and Amici del Casamale, admission is always free, with the inauguration set for Friday 20 July at 8 pm.
Info:
Vittorio Valiante: Mātĕr-ĭa
21/07/2023 – 31/12/2023
curated by Elisa Perillo
Chiesa Collegiata in Santa Maria Maggiore
Via Campane, Borgo Casamale, Somma Vesuviana (NA)
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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