30 Agosto 2025 / 24 Settembre 2025

Velasco Vitali
in Pietrasanta
opening Saturday, August 30 at 7:00 p.m.
from August 31 to September 24, 2025

“Velasco, (as his name reveals) is a painter of winds and weather, educated by the barren, polished lesson of stones and the capriciousness of clouds, a lake-like temperament of placated fire, thoughtful and earthy” [...]
Marco Vallora, Specchio (La Stampa), November 4, 2000.

From August 31 to September 24, 2025, a new solo exhibition by Velasco Vitali will be presented at the Pietrasanta venue. Two cycles emblematic of his artistic research are presented, brought together under the same light for the first time: Vele (Sails) and Terra Rossa (Red Earth). Two complementary poles, like air and earth, lightness and weight. A work that encompasses thirty years of research on composition and color and questions about painting that are never completely resolved.

Painting that seeks no other meaning than to exist: “the sail at sea as a vehicle of disengagement: purifying painting because it is pure and motivated only by itself,” writes Fabrizio Dentice. It is a Velasco who “sings,” an artist who entrusts control and emotion to gesture, almost frozen by a conceptual approach that frees itself in an exercise of breath and lightness. Every sail, every chromatic fold, is the intersection of instinct and memory: a balance built on the thin thread of lines and color, where the white canvas is not empty but tension, an invisible force that directs the eye toward the essential question: how to hold form and freedom together?

 
The mind turns to Malevich and his red square: point zero, the place where abstraction and figure cease to oppose each other and blur the boundaries. In Terra Rossa, this challenge becomes even more radical: here, painting no longer has the pretext of wind or sea, but the concreteness of the earth. An abandoned tennis court: white lines that emerge like traces, as if to ask whether it is possible to paint with a single color and make it vibrate like magma.
Velasco works tirelessly, seeking the slightest variation each time: a white that borders on ochre, a threshold that separates bright red from shadow. Thus, the fields become mental maps, abstract figures that repeat and contradict each other, never identical. Each line is a path, each modulation a repository of memory.

On display, the two series mirror each other: Le Vele as abandonment and breath, Terra Rossa as obstinacy and a return to matter. On one side, the open horizon; on the other, Mediterranean dust, terracotta, color that becomes substance and root. Both, however, express the same ambition: to reinvent reality through painting, starting from scratch each time.
 
Velasco Vitali
August 31 - September 24, 2025
opening August 30 from 7 p.m.