The Po river

Here there's a river landscape with a bridge and a small orange sun that stands out on the right side of the painting. The canvas is an example of that informal landscape in which the supremacy of sentiment is in force: the color changes to intense shades and it is applied with vigorous brushstrokes in order to give strength and energy to the image, without falling into abstraction.The expressionistic component is made explicit by strong chromatic accentuations and marked incisiveness of the sign. The work dates back to 1954, and it can be ascribed to the period in which the painter, with an open and sensitive personality, manages to find his own balance and an individual interpretation by relating the realist current, typical of that period, and the informal trends. In this river landscape, Zoni makes use of inventiveness, transcends the merely naturalistic datum and creates, in the space of the depiction, a vision pervaded by subtle restlessness, the result of his psychological dimension. The brush strokes are insisted, the sun, an orange spot, seems to get lost in the immense blue sky; the waters of the river are separated from the celestial vault only by a thin strip of brown color, which refers to the idea of ​​a bridge, the only element or obstacle that breaks the continuity between heaven and earth, between sky and stream. Zoni never ceases to maintain contact with nature, which becomes the place where the lights beat violently, and make what is represented an effervescence of color. The author turns his gaze on the nature that is familiar to him, that is, the environments and glimpses of the Emilian and Lombard plain, painting the banks of the great river, the Po. The fact that he is strongly anchored to his origins, translates into a progressive and voluntary withdrawal into an individual world, in which the emotion and feeling that the vision of nature arouse becomes fundamental; however it is not a perception of the idyllic and tranquil natural reality.