Giuseppe Pende
Reality, dream and vision

Name: Giuseppe Pende
Start: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
End: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Location: Palazzo dei Priori museum complex

Palazzo dei Priori museum complex

Fermo, Marche, Italy

The show

Giuseppe Pende stands out in the panorama of the twentieth century for his original poetics and for his mastery of the true and plausible of still lifes, portraits, views of Puglia, the Marche and Zara and invented landscapes , often immersed in an atmosphere of dream. He painted what he loved most for eighty years, leaving behind a few months before his death the brushes that his father, an amateur painter and magistrate, put in his hands at the age of eight. Giuseppe Pende has been fascinated since a very young age by the painting of the greats of the past and does not refer to any particular school or movement contemporary to him, but relies on his very personal feelings, his irrepressible drive for improvement, his being both a scientist and a poet of reality and imagination on the canvas. Attracted by the new, by the future, he fills every moment of his present and reacts to the pain of the soul with a growing attachment to life. That intense pleasure of living pours into painting together with all the love for the beauty of creation and does so with noble research, refined technique and effervescent creativity.

Giuseppe Pende's exhibition in the Palazzo dei Priori in Fermo, with paintings owned by his heirs, might at first glance seem more like a collective of painters than a small selection of works by a single artist, but the common thread is his genius pictorial that also enchants for its compositional balance, beauty, poetry and for the serenity and surprise induced in the observer who, in the presence of some of his landscapes, can also play with the mind looking for those microscopic details invisible to the naked eye which make them become, after the initial impact, surreal landscapes. The work “With the stones I spoke” is emblematic, a variant from '92.

The events of the war brought him to Fermo in '42 and he later chose not to return to Puglia, in the privileged condition of his origins, but remained to live with his wife and children next to the Tenna river. There he spent one of the most exciting decades of his life, surrounded by nature overflowing with flowers, scents and colours. He reluctantly leaves Tenna in '54 to move closer to the city center for the greater good of his children, but he always continues to return to the river and also walks in the mountains, in the countryside, along the coast. While regenerating himself physically and mentally, he studies the phenomena of light and the harmony of colors which he transfers into his paintings, or reports in a lesson at school, or writes down with profound, lucid and original reflections such as those on the advantages of painting on nature and even more on photography. As an old man he is forced into a more sedentary life by the problems of age and those typical of athletes who abuse their bodies for too long, and so he travels in his canvases, in the immense and airy skies, in the enchanted depths, in the mirrors of water, among the stones, twigs and bushes of bright places that populate with people regardless of the passing time, sometimes in the company of strange characters, giants or jesters, and in each of those landscapes the painter finds moments of himself .