The exhibition “Valerio Bellati: chromatic alchemy” will be held from 28 October at the Carlo Rizzarda Modern Art Gallery.

This is an exhibition event dedicated to an artist whose family has Feltre origins. His refined and lyrical painting is characterized by precious mixtures, modulated on a subtle contrast of tones and colours.

It is a painting understood as a very personal expression of oneself and as such profoundly biographical. Valerio Bellati (Padua 18 March 1923-Vittorio Veneto 1 April 1996) attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, following the courses of Alberto Viani and Venanzo Crocetti. The first season of his artistic career was dedicated to sculpture, progressively approaching painting as the privileged medium of his poetics which found the main expressive figure in abstract expressionism. He was a friend of Tancredi Parmeggiani who introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim's entourage and was close to the spatialist group. He also frequented Riccardo Licata, Giorgio Dario Paolucci, Ivan Beltrame, Virgilio Guidi, Gianni Palminteri and Riccardo Schweizer. At the invitation of Mario De Luigi he participated in the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962 where he exhibited a large panel worked with engobe. He disappeared from the art scene until 1968 when he resumed painting a series of works characterized by his own ideograms. From the Seventies he retired to Premaor di Miane in the province of Treviso, in the seventeenth-century family home, where he worked assiduously, reaching a personal language that evolved over time through various experimentalisms. Shortly before his death in 1996 he managed to complete his last work Versi e Dipinti together with the poet Andrea Zanzotto. The exhibition will feature around fifty works including drawings, paintings and sculptures, offering the visitor the opportunity to get to know a highly original interpreter of the lively Venetian artistic climate of the second half of the twentieth century.

Exhibition curated by Francesco Michielin.