Vinicio Berti

After the conference AVANTI POPOLO!  held last summer between Palazzo Vecchio and Museo Novecento, the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vinicio Berti continue under the banner of the tribute with which we intend to pay homage to the famous Florentine master: for the occasion, in fact, an exceptionally ideal triptych, the subject of a restoration completed precisely for the current exhibition.

The paintings, made in mixed media on hardboard, are shown as panels of an ideal triptych, which guides the viewer in a tale of anguish and redemption. The narrative starts from Construction of total reality, an ’empty scene’ in which the dense visual geometries draw inhospitable and hostile landscapes and our gaze cannot penetrate.

We are called to walk the tight succession of linear elements in search of a light and a glimmer, but the ideally built environment appears saturated and our wandering constantly hindered. In contrast to this construction, the emergence of figures in the front panel, entitled Human Presences. As in a short circuit, typified and abstracted reality welcomes, like apparitions, images of a woman with a child rendered with an incisive, almost expressionist stroke. True contemporary piety, these figures insert a narrative element into the composition that almost seems to clash with the unspeakable constructiveness of the red and black signs of an abstract matrix.