8 May 2024 / 13 June 2024

From May 8th to June 13th, 2024 Antonia Jannone presents TERRA ROSSA, a new exhibition by Velasco Vitali focusing on the artist’s production dedicated to red clay tennis courts.

In everyone’s imagination, grass is the paradise of tennis, the stage on which grace, elegance, and lightness are staged, while red clay is an arena of atonement, where the game becomes toil, sweat, and often torment.

Velasco Vitali’s production dedicated to the world of tennis begins in 2017, when the artist rents a new studio with a greenhouse and a real tennis court: the latter will be a source of inspiration for him for paintings titled “square” or “court”, strictly monochrome compositions on variations of red, which Gianni Clerici also recounts in the volume “Il Tennis nell’Arte” (Mondadori 2018).

In the following years, the cycle of paintings was enriched with a new title: Terra Rossa, a reference to “Красный квадрат” , universally known as “red square,” one of Kazimir Malevič’s most famous paintings.Activating a new imaginative state, Vitali with this exhibition embarks on a new journey in his painting, shifting the focus to the soft, friable material of color and the dusty nature of red ochre.

The compositions of these paintings refer back to fragments or angular cuts of tennis courts, to vast fields of a single color rearticulated by geometries of white lines that redesign the context: painting thus becomes a means to activate the imagination, and color a metaphor for art as well as sport.

Terra Rossa offers us a key to interpretation, a stimulus to question the power of images in the contemporary era and how new visions can be imagined starting from this earth-colored color, which transforms the playing field into an archetypal dimension: in these works, color comes to its essence with the task of telling or imagining, playing only with the material that composes it.

On the occasion of the exhibition, will be presented the volume Terra Rossa by Matteo Codignola and Velasco Vitali, Edizioni Henry Beyle.

“If we really want to talk about dreams, and when tennis is involved, it is dreams we are talking about, the recurring one of each of us is an empty court, immaculate, right before a match soils it - says Matteo Codignola - Empty and possibly smooth, without worn areas or rubber marks, without anything. Just the lines, the net - and the ground.”

Velasco Vitali

TERRA ROSSA

8th May - 13th June 2024

opening 8 May 2024, 6:00 pm