On Saturday 25 November 2023 at 5 pm, Galleria Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna, opens The Paintings of Sigfrido Bartolini, the gallery’s second solo exhibition devoted to this major Italian artist of the second half of the twentieth century. Featuring 30 oil paintings and watercolours, the exhibition follows the 2019 show dedicated to Bartolini’s graphic work, including lithographs, etchings and woodcuts.

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

The exhibition includes eight oil paintings, some on a large scale. Several depict Bartolini’s distinctive Tuscan landscapes: unpaved roads, imposing country houses and skies that share something of their austere, uncompromising character. Other oils turn to the sea, with unusual coastal scenes punctuated by tents and huts whose forms echo the architecture of Tuscany.

The selection of twenty-four watercolours includes Bartolini’s recurring — yet endlessly varied — large Tuscan houses, alongside a group devoted to San Vigilio di Marebbe, where the artist spent many holidays with his family.

Beatrice Buscaroli writes:

“Massive houses like ancient fortresses, neither empty nor inhabited, but primordial alphabets of every civilisation: letters from a vocabulary that only time will reveal. And time, in turn, enters into dialogue with something eccentric and immeasurable: the sky and its clouds. Without surface or outline, clouds occupy no fixed place and have neither a definite shape nor clear boundaries. For Bartolini, the cloud ultimately poses a problem for painting itself. It exposes the limitations and imperfections of representation, a perspective that cannot truly be depicted. His skies therefore become a threshold, an elusive pictorial element in which the immaterial and the transient seem to prevail.

Bartolini is ‘wild’, rooted in the Strapaese tradition, yet also ‘hesitant’. Time and history have inevitably altered the language of his painting. Maccari’s uncompromising stance has faded, but subtle traces of those earlier affinities remain. Above all, they survive in the landscape, a true ‘revelation’ that leads the artist towards a direct and emotional experience of reality.

This rural geography invites experience rather than description: an encounter with a landscape understood as a tangible, lived place. In Bartolini’s work, it is also often a landscape without figures. Houses, hills and seascapes seem to resist human presence, as though nothing should disturb the completeness of the places offered to our gaze. What remains are impressions registered through feeling: traces of the sensations nature leaves upon our vision at the very moment they take shape and become alive.”

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