Continuing the series of exhibitions at the Gallerie dell’Accademia dedicated to particularly significant artistic personalities of our time, this year’s choice fell on Luciano Vistosi, one of the very few internationally recognized glass artists. This year, Venice is celebrating the “thousand years” of “its” glass. The formula adopted so far for such events, which is the presentation of a limited corpus of works suitable to offer a plausible historical overview of the artist followed by a large number of recent and possibly unpublished testimonies, has been abandoned for this occasion. Indeed, after the exhibition held at Ca’ Pesaro in 1980, it was considered redundant to re-propose Luciano Vistosi’s curriculum in its entirety. Instead, the focus has been placed on his latest production, marked by a sculptural dimension of unprecedented luminous vitality, devoid of any realistic attributes, and yet so evocative of a pacified and pacifying naturalistic iconicity.
That Luciano Vistosi has reached a poetic goal of high creative tension in this last period is indicated by the writings of two of the most attentive and reliable witnesses of contemporary artistic practice, Giovanni Carandente and Giuseppe Mazzariol, whom I thank for having critically sponsored this third contemporary art exhibition organized by the Superintendence of Artistic and Historical Heritage of Venice.
Francesco Valcanover
Superintendent of Artistic and Historical Heritage of Venice