Armando De Stefano
Nothing dies sine linea

Name: Armando De Stefano
Start: 2022-05-13 00:00:00
End: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Location: Madre - Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art

Madre - Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art

Naples, Campania, Italy

The show

The Madre, contemporary art museum of the Campania Region , presents the Armando De Stefano Nulla dies sine linea exhibition, a tribute to the Neapolitan master one year after his death, curated by Olga Scotto di Vettimo.

Over 80 works on display - mainly papers - which represent the selection of a larger corpus of works dated between 2012 and 2020 and testify to an ever-current creativity, which reinvents and rethinks drawing and figuration, confirming the vital urgency, extreme and unconditional for De Stefano to rely on the uninterrupted exercise of the hand, the sign and the color, as well as the undisputed centrality of drawing in all his pictorial work.

The expression Nulla dies sine linea , attributed to Apelles by Pliny the Elder in the Naturalis historia , refers to the daily and constant exercise of the Greek painter of the fourth century BC, whose ability in drawing still remains an example of an activity that requires methodical dedication and rigorous commitment. In this sense, to affirm that Armando De Stefano (Naples 1926-2021) has not spent any day without drawing a line is not to be understood as a forced transposition of an ancient motto referring to the intentions of the Neapolitan artist, but as an objective recognition of his total and absolute dedication to art, as evidenced by the varied and extensive catalog of works created in over 70 years of activity and enriched until shortly before his death. On the other hand, De Stefano himself used to repeat that Plinian expression, which embodies the inextricable intertwining of art and life of some artistic and biographical experiences, recognizing himself in it and making it his own to describe the sense of his own commitment and his own passion, so much so that he chose it as the title for an exhibition of recent works that he planned to present at the Madre museum.