Alberto Magnelli : Painting is, First and Foremost, Architecture

With this exhibition, Painting Is, First and Foremost, Architecture dedicated to Alberto Magnelli, Lorenzelli Arte wishes to give continuity to the series of exhibitions dedicated to the great Italian masters, distancing itself from simple, obvious and superficial rediscoveries while bypassing epigones and linguistic rhetoric. 

The show is to be understood as a focus on an indisputable master, too long left in the shadows in his own country and yet present in museums around the world, proposing thirty pieces that document more than fifty years of activity from 1913 to 1964. 

Alberto Magnelli was, in fact, absolutely a protagonist in the abstract revolution that brought new life to European pictorial culture. He lived and re-elaborated in his way the fecund Parisian climate of the early Twentieth Century without ever forgetting the great lessons of the Italian figurative tradition that was ever present in his palette, as his 1913 painting: La cecia sulla tavola testifies; the painting that opens the exhibition. 

The title chosen for this exhibition is of itself an expositive artistic declaration extrapolated from from a text written by Bernard Dorival that underlined the strong tie that concatenated Magnelli's pictorial language to that of the early Italian Renaissance: 
“The 15th. Century Tuscan school understood that painting is first and foremost architecture, an order of simplified and massive forms, still and solid, whose majesty is reinforced by the incisiveness of line that profiles and exalts it, a composition in which rhythm is the pulsation and the music, a mental thing that places under discussion man's intelligence and will (…)” 

The taste and the sensibility of the color that characterize his artistic production echo the 15th. Century lesson that, whose declension is rewritten in the artist's personal abstract alphabet, are able to become color in an architectonic form, as the following painting shown in the exhibition demonstrate: Un peu rouge and Voyage, both painted in 1937, or Mesures Illimitées n°8 from 1953. 

The show is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with color reproductions of all the work shown in the exhibition and an anthology of critical texts that have followed Magnelli's artist path, among which a 1975 text by Piero Dorazio stands out.