PITTORI LOMBARDI

Given the inherently hybrid and complex nature of design as a discipline, a gallery devoted to it cannot fail to find in painting another field for exploration and research.

This becomes even more interesting, precisely because it creates greater distance from the gallery’s own field, when the gaze turns to the past and towards figurative languages that are still “pre-contemporary”.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Lombardy was home to major figures working within a particularly sensitive and restless tradition of landscape painting. A form of painting that may once have appeared almost conventional and reassuring began to reveal Symbolist and Decadent undercurrents. The Lombard landscape, so distinctly removed from the Mediterranean, became an ideal breeding ground for these oblique sensibilities. Pompeo Mariani, Eugenio Gignous and other artists exhibited here worked in the very context from which the genius of Giovanni Segantini would emerge.

Segantini’s work has long been a declared source of inspiration for Federico Canobbio Codelli, a contemporary painter whose finely calligraphic ink lines over pastel colours and monochrome prints in China blue on transparent methacrylate depict the Lombard landscapes of today, here placed in dialogue with the oils on canvas of centuries past.

Different techniques and different periods, yet the connection with that remarkable chapter of a resolutely Lombard tradition of painting has by no means been broken.