Still Life on the Sea

Emilio Vedova (1919-2006) from a very young age, showed a strong passion for drawing. In Venice, he began attending the art school at the Carmini, although his training was mainly self-taught and conducted through the study of Venetian painters, Tintoretto being the foremost. In the immediate postwar period, he became one of the protagonists of abstractionism, which for him was a tool capable of bringing to light what would otherwise remain invisible. At the center of Vedova's work is the human being, with his individual feelings and experiences. The artist demolishes any reassuring and stabilizing formal framework on a path toward an expressionistic, spontaneous, and gesturally restless script. In this period, Vedova elaborates on the first collages and gives life to paintings where signs and colors appear organized within geometric structures. The chromatic layering is sharp, and the energy is harnessed in planes that are at once rigorous and animated. His painting in the immediate postwar period is well evidenced by works such as "Still Life on the Sea" of 1947, in which his artistic sensibility registers emotions coming from outside and, like a seismograph, transforms them into contrasts of surface, sign, color, and volume.