Edited by Angelo Crespi

The Stelline Foundation hosts the exhibition The limit of the real. From abstractionism to abstraction, a retrospective dedicated to Luciano Ventrone (Rome, 1942), defined by Federico Zeri - who discovered him - as the Caravaggio of the twentieth century.

From his beginnings as a classical figurative painter to geometric experiments, passing through informal and programmed art, this exhibition of 30 works, many of which are being exhibited to the public for the first time, explores the long career of Luciano Ventrone, who began painting at a very young age in the early 1960s, fulfilling a sort of early vocation. His apprenticeship was long and full of digressions, following the various currents of Italian painting and the post-World War II era, which eventually allowed him to arrive with increasing strength at a very personal style, the "Ventronian abstract realism" in which the foundations of painting (form, light, color) are put at the service of a Platonic philosophical conception aimed at revealing the world of prime ideas.

From the 1990s of the twentieth century, especially the still lifes are no longer, and only, the representation of reality, a mimetic effort worthy of praise, but rather the successful attempt, thanks to a talent cultivated daily with effort, to go beyond reality - as Angelo Crespi explains - and experiment with "the limit of the real", that is, that subtle line that distances us from effective knowledge, moving away from real objects and approaching as much as possible the abstraction of "things."

Ventrone - who defines himself as an abstract artist grappling with reality, a metaphysician forced to confront the transience of nature - is not only one of the greatest and most well-known figure painters internationally, but above all he is a scientist of painting and, since the representations in the 1960s of cells enlarged under the microscope, works later made available to neurology texts, he has refined his ancient painting technique made of patient oil glazes, comparing it with the most advanced technologies that today allow us to look and see "more" beyond reality.

Hence arises the wonder of a painting that does not deceive the eye, but the mind, and forces us into a short circuit to give meaning to what does not exist in reality, fruits, vegetables, flowers that are never so perfect, never so illuminated, never so close to being real.