I had a great surprise yesterday 4day, in Peschiera del Garda. I discovered an exhibition of art by contemporary painters. It consisted of work by several painters from the region, principally the area around Verona, who had been participants in a project organised under the auspices of the Italian equivalent of Britain’s Open Unive4sity. The material on show all explored “hyper-realism”. Now yhis is far from being my favourite approach to art, and is certainly not my own style. The reason for my delight, however, is that in all the years I have been coming to the country, this is one of the few signs I have encountered that there are actually any living and working artists in the country. Almost without fail galleries and museums will off visitors items from Italy’s past. Today’s visit to Verona is a case in point, where it was possible to view an excellent display of work from the 15th and 16th centuries!
I have feared for a long time that Italy has been the unfortunate victim of the Grand Tour, in which visitors came to the country precisely in order to experience the glories of its cultural past. There was never any suggestion that the Italians the visitors met were capable of anything interesting or valuable. Somehow this attitude seems to have become internalised and perpetrated.
I am delighted to have been able to pick up business cards from three of the artists whose work I saw yesterday, and I hope that it might be possible to develop a correspondence with them. It would be good to be able to tell people that art is not dead in Italy.