Six years after the exhibition Rubaldo Merello and the attraction of the landscape between divisionism and symbolism, set up at Palazzo Ducale between 2017 and 2018, this new exhibition, dedicated to the artistic experience of one of the most famous Ligurian painters and the best-known and appreciated singer of the harsh but evocative coastal landscapes of the Eastern Riviera, returns to reanalyze his overall and articulated research in the graphic and pictorial field. Starting from the fundamental nucleus of paintings and drawings preserved in the collections of the Gallery of Modern Art of Genoa - integrated with some significant works from the Wolfsoniana-Palazzo Ducale Foundation for Culture and with a selection of loans from private collections - the exhibition intends in fact offer a rereading of his original research path, highlighting two peculiar aesthetic and operational attitudes: on the one hand the predilection towards a non-anthropized nature onto which the painter projected his own emotional and psychological tensions, in his prolonged and introspective relationship with the landscape emergencies of a delimited geographical area (the woods, slopes, cliffs and inlets of the territory framed between the Ruta di Camogli, the bay of San Fruttuoso and Portofino); on the other, the fantastic dimension that animates, in the graphic field, the protagonists of his mythological and allegorical representations.

While in the first area of intervention, Merello, starting from the pointillist lesson of which he was one of the main interpreters (it is worth remembering here that in 1907 he participated in the Salon des Peintres Divisionnistes Italiens in Paris ordered by Alberto Grubicy), directed himself towards the progressive transformation of the pictorial material and the chromatic palette, towards a research tangent with the linguistic innovations of post-impressionist painting and with the emerging aesthetic concerns of the Fauve culture, in the field of drawing - as well as in that of sculpture (often united by common thematic motifs) - is instead his close proximity to the expressive dynamics of symbolism and the modern movement is evident. Friend of the writer, poet, critic and playwright Sem Benelli, for whom he created the illustrations for the poem The Wedding of the Centaurs in 1915 and with whom he shared the passion for restless and decadent atmospheres typical of symbolist culture, Merello expressed this aesthetic tension of his and spiritual of literary origin through a nervous graphic language and a vigorous plastic impetus, influenced by specific national and international references (Segantini, Bistolfi, Nomellini, Baroni, De Albertis, Böcklin, Klinger and von Stuck). The complexity and richness of the themes addressed within this new and evocative investigation into Merello's art will finally find precise confirmation in many works present in the permanent exhibitions of the Gallery of Modern Art and the Wolfsoniana, thus offering a broader cross-section on the artistic period covered by the exhibition.