Twenty years ago, on June 13, 1999, Renato Nesi, one of the best known and most appreciated Treviso painters of the second half of the twentieth century, died. The city of Treviso dutifully pays homage to him with an exhibition that is organized simultaneously in the spaces of the Luigi Bailo Civic Museum, the Art School Gallery and the Diocesan Museum. The artist's entire career, from early beginnings to the end of the Thirties, is retraced through a rich anthology of works - 70 paintings, drawings and engravings -, which allow you to appreciate its evolution in its many creative phases. Not even twenty years old and freshman of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Nesi participated in 1942 at the XI exhibition of Treviso art at Palazzo dei Trecento at the invitation of Giuseppe Mazzotti, and then was present at all the provincial exhibitions held in the 1950s and beyond . He was one of the architects of the rebirth of art in the city immediately after the war with the Rossignona group, thus undertaking a personal research path that led him to particularly important results, both in the field of landscape painting and in portraiture.
The exhibition, curated by Eugenio Manzato and Raffaello Padovan and enriched by a catalog that represents an updated critical point of view on the artist, was made possible thanks to the decisive contribution of private collectors and in particular of the artist's family, who in the occasion generously wanted to donate two of the most important works in the exhibition to the Municipal Administration: a "Self-portrait" (1942) and "The empty plate" (1943).