On Saturday 25 November 2023 at 5 pm, the exhibition La pittura di Sigfrido Bartolini opens at Galleria Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna. This is the second solo exhibition at the gallery dedicated to the major Italian artist of the second half of the twentieth century, following the 2019 exhibition focused on his graphic work (lithographs, etchings and woodcuts).

Curated by Jacopo Cenacchi, the exhibition is accompanied by a critical text by Professor Beatrice Buscaroli.

The works on view include eight oil paintings, some of large scale, depicting Bartolini’s characteristic Tuscan landscapes—dirt roads, large rural houses, “as austere as his skies”. Other oil paintings are devoted to original seascapes, enriched by elements such as tents and huts that echo Tuscan architectural forms. The selection of twenty-four watercolours includes, alongside the recurring yet always varied “Tuscan houses”, a group dedicated to San Vigilio di Marebbe, where Bartolini spent extended periods with his family.

As Beatrice Buscaroli writes:

“Houses, solid as ancient fortresses—not empty, nor full, but primordial alphabets of every civilisation, letters of a vocabulary that only time will reveal. A time that is nonetheless placed in dialogue with an eccentric, immeasurable element: the sky and its clouds. Without surface or contour, clouds do not occupy a place and have neither definite form nor limits. The cloud, in fact, is a problem for painting itself: it reveals how the system of representation is exclusive and imperfect—a perspective that cannot be fully represented. Thus Bartolini’s skies appear as a limit, as an elusive figurative element where the immaterial and the contingent seem to prevail.

Bartolini is ‘wild’, deeply rooted in the countryside, yet also ‘hesitant’. Time and history have inevitably altered the paradigm of style. The intransigence of the Maccari group has dissolved, yet subtle traces of those earlier affiliations remain—beginning with landscape, a true ‘revelation’ that guides the artist towards a direct and emotional perception of reality.

A rural geography that invites experience rather than description: an experience that defines an environment in its concreteness as a lived place. In Bartolini, landscape is often also the absence of figures—houses, hills, seascapes—where human presence is almost repelled, so as not to disturb the completeness of these places offered to vision. Impressions of a sensitive recording, traces of the sensation that nature impresses upon our gaze at the very moment it takes form and comes to life.”

La pittura di Sigfrido Bartolini
Curated by Jacopo Cenacchi
with a text by Beatrice Buscaroli
25 November > 23 December 2023

SPECIAL OPENINGS
Friday 8 December
Sundays 10 and 17 December
4.30–7.30 pm

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday: 4.30–7.30 pm
Monday: by appointment
Sunday: closed