Symphonie Urbaine, exhibition by Lucio Schiavon
« I see the city as a polyphony of gestures, of silences, of voices that intersect without always understand each other. Drawing allows me to slow down this cacophony to extract an inner music from it. »
For several years, the gallery has enthusiastically supported the work of Lucio Schiavon, Venetian artist whose work uniquely intertwines drawing and music. With Symphonie Urbaine, we present for the first time a dense corpus, which unites works already exhibited in an important group of unpublished drawings. These works, more or less recent, are many fragments of a patient research around the city.
Venice, of course, is its anchor point. Lucio's hometown, it ties him,
in his words, a double thread: a thread stretched between love and contradiction. This thread extends elsewhere. Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong,... These metropolises appear in his drawings like notes on a living score.
The exhibition reveals a true evolution of the artist's work, from the first drawings, almost like the backbone of a score, up to larger compositions, crossed by color.
The title of the exhibition reflects this profound connection with composition. Symphonie Urbaine resonates like a jazz breath, marked by breaks, improvisations and
syncope. Some works recall textile materials, such as fine embroidery that Schiavon patiently weaves to give life to his cities.
In this urban fabric, the perspectives unfold both vertically and in
horizontal. Sometimes, small figures appear between the folds of the drawing: small discreet, almost hidden characters, as if they were crossing a music pentagram. They float in the city being anonymous witnesses of interior landscapes or simple inhabitants immersed in their urban space.
At the heart of this poetic cartography, water imposes itself as a presence
constant. It runs through the works as a character in its own right. It generates a diffuse resonance and amplifies that sensation of suspended space typical of the universe of Schiavon.
It is no coincidence that Lucio Schiavon mentions Antonioni's La Notte among his deepest inspirations, in resonance with the suspended atmosphere of his drawings. That wandering night in an almost silent city finds a deep echo in his drawings. The line of Schiavon recalls the way Antonioni observes the city: slow, suspended, attentive to the silences and invisible margins.
In these urban landscapes, skyscrapers intersect with liquid reflections, vibrations of shattered lines, and green traffic lights of New York. Each image evokes an intuitive score, an unstable balance between saturated colors and deep blacks.
And in this patient construction, an unexpected resonance is felt: that of Guido Cadorin, another Venetian artist, born in 1892 and died in 1976. Without Schiavon really knew him, their works seem to dialogue over time.
One thinks of Piazzale Roma by Cadorin (1958), of those atmospheres immersed in a cloudy light. Same chromatic vibration, same tension between reflection and structure. In both, the city becomes suspended light, diluted in water or air.
With this urban symphony, Lucio Schiavon invites us to travel through his cities as you enter a jazz piece: with the ear, with the step, with intuition. The city becomes a time, and the drawing, an inner music.
The exhibition is open from July 17th to October 1st at the Galleria Garance & Marion - Cannaregio 4590!