Emilio Vedova

Galleria Blu, Milan
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1975

Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Galleria Blu, Quarant'anni in Blu, 1977, p. 77, illustrated

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: The work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals few tiny spots of media accretion towards the lower centre. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Beautifully chaotic and compositionally dense, Per La Spagna is one of the most resolved exemplars of Emilio Vedova's celebrated abstract paintings. Executed at the height of the artist's career, Per la Spagna is an outstanding example of the eponymous and distinguished series dating 1962. The intense and vigorous black and white paint strokes are beautifully ruptured by brilliant yellow and red hues creating a lyrical, vivid and highly satisfying composition. Through a confident combination of gestural spontaneity and expert sense of colour, Vedova succeeds to convey in Per la Spagna an almost sculptural sense of three dimensionality. The intense impact of the monumental canvas stems from a perfect balance between a fluid painterly visual dynamism and an underlying powerful architectural structure.

Originally from Venice, Baroque art and architecture had always been part of Vedova's visual culture. Of particular importance was Francesco Tintoretto whose dramatic use of light and space highly influenced Vedova as documented by the latter's 1937 figurative paintings, The Raising of Lazarus and Crucifixion. In these early works Vedova revisited the subjects of Tintoretto's decorations of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice (1564-1588). Palma Bucarelli has pointed out how in these figurative and gestural paintings from the 1930s Vedova was already exploring the realm of Abstraction. (Palma Bucarelli cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Emilio Vedova, 1998-99, p. 190).

In 1946 Vedova declared his beliefs in both politics and painting by signing the Oltre Guernica (Beyond Guernica) manifesto, which championed a revolutionary art that was abstract as opposed to the presiding terms for neo-realism. This ideological excitement and conviction led him pictorially to translate political dissent into wild patterns and painterly gesture where figures become dissolved into Abstraction. Feeling isolated in his artistic research, in 1952 Vedova joined the avant-garde Gruppo degli Otto (Group of the Eight), of which Afro and Santomaso were already part, and which promoted Abstraction. Their pioneering activity paralleled the contemporaneous advances of American Abstract Expressionism. Although the dripped and poured paint of Vedova's technique recalls Jackson Pollock's action paintings, his equally monumental compositions rather express the anxiety and anguish of specific historical moments than being a subconscious creation.  

In the late 1950s Vedova experimented with a more spontaneous painterly technique liberating compositional structure and abandoning the geometrical rigidity of his earlier abstract paintings: "At the end of the 1950s I had a crisis; I rebelled against geometry, the dominant rigor in my paintings, and tried to make my work vibrate with more spontaneity." (the artist cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Venezia, Museo Correr, Vedova 1935-84, 1984, p. 35). Realized two years after Vedova was unanimously awarded the Grand Prize for painting by the international jury at the XXX Venice Biennale, Per la Spagna exactly embodies these key developments and is thus a work of major historic significance with the mature oeuvre of Emilio Vedova.

In 1958 Vedova was awarded the Lissone prize and was given the opportunity to travel through Spain for two months where he studied the great Spanish Masters, especially Goya and El Greco. Vedova absorbed the baroque sense of light and spatial interplay, which fills their paintings. In Spain Vedova had also lived through the wretched residues left by the Civil War (1936-39) and the subsequent military junta of Franco's dictatorship. Vedova expressed his condemnation of the intolerant authoritarian regime with the Per la Spagna series through an Abstraction that is both visually energetic and politically engaged. In the Per la Spagna series, executed in 1962 once the artist was back in Venice, Vedova condensed this rediscovered love of baroque with his radical political views. This conflation was central to Vedova's art, and he described the thin demarcation between politics and art at the time: "we talk about our paintings, which means that we talk about our life, and through this, in one way or another, we opt to do what we state. Yet, we would rather live day by day in temptation, rather than the victims of that inertia which turns life into a countless number of acts of cowardice." (the artist cited in: 'Dipingere un naso non e' cosi' semplice' in: Blatter+Bilder, no. 12, 1961, note 1, p. 15).

Per la Spagna is an extremely beautiful example of the culmination of the artist's career, in which the spontaneity of his Abstract paintings perfectly merges with his political engagement. Ultimately, Vedova's painting, as epitomised by the stunning Per la Spagna, brings together a host of the artist beliefs, experiences, resulting in a sensational artistic collision on the canvas. Indeed, as observed by Jörn Merkert "[for Vedova] the painting is a field where an existential tale is articulated, exhibited in a permanent collision of situations. And Vedova does not mince words about collision, either with himself, or with painting as a spiritual organism." (Jörn Merkert, Abstract Painting as Reality, or Collision of Situations in: Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Emilio Vedova, 1998-99, p. 313).