Vincent De Grandi | Undated
Oil on canvas | 22 x 34.5 cm
Period 1969-1984: The beauty of the
imaginary world | Landscape with architecture
Inventory VDG-34 | Private
collection Photo L'Atelier De Grandi
Artistic features
Subject:
An imaginary portico emerging from a lagoon, accompanied by a gondola and darkly dressed characters reminiscent of doctors treating the plague in Venice in 1575.
Composition:
The dominant figure (the portico) is fully in keeping with the elongated horizontal format of the painting and separates the space into two areas: the foreground area, made up of sand and water banks where some much smaller figures are located, and the barely perceptible area of the open lagoon in the background, behind the portico, where the horizon almost melts into the sky. This separation gives the scene a character of contemplative stagnation.
Medium:
"The technique [of oil painting] remains traditional, smooth and fine, with a great suppleness of touch [more suggestive than descriptive], a delicate refinement of matter."
Georges Peillex, Exhibition catalogue p. 46
Pallet:
A range of colours very close to each other (the sky contains beige tones of the portico and the lagoon), with no contrast apart from the dark tones of the little characters, allows Vincent to create this atmosphere without shadows and all in transparency, both stagnant and contemplative.
Background
Period:
With the independence gained for their children, Italo and Vincent also find their own: they leave graphic arts and silkscreen printing and blossom in the plastic arts. Vincent expresses his imagination mainly through oil painting and drawing, exclusively in his studio. Italo, always on the subject, pursues his contemplation of landscape, his wonder in front of nature, and goes from oil painting to washing through watercolour, tempera, charcoal, lead pencil or sanguine and is initiated to sculpture in wrought iron.
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