Ennio Finzi (Venice 1931) After temporarily attending courses at the Art Institute of Venice, he was attracted by the fascinating discovery of the structural upheaval of Cubism, which allowed him to transcend the real data of representation. The meeting with Atanasio Soldati influenced his subsequent works, characterized by bright colors and rigorous formal balances. Read the full biography
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Ennio Finzi (Venice 1931) After temporarily attending courses at the Art Institute of Venice, he was attracted by the fascinating discovery of the structural upheaval of Cubism, which allowed him to transcend the real data of representation. The meeting with Atanasio Soldati influenced his subsequent works, characterized by bright colors and rigorous formal balances. Thus were born the first "inventions" in which rhythm, colour, light, timbre take on the role of supporting elements and will become a basic constant of all his research. In those years, the influence exerted on Finzi by Virgilio Guidi for the ideological strength of creative thought and by Emilio Vedova for the impetus of the gesture that attacks the surface was notable. The discovery of twelve-tone music led him to appropriate the principle of "dissonance". Suddenly, in this way, the practice of a color freed from any relationship of tone and loaded with the exclusive function of timbre, opens up new and vast horizons, so much so that from that moment until the end of the 1950s his work was an obsessive research into the semantics of gesture, light and timbre. At the end of the 1950s, marked by the shocking intuitions of Lucio Fontana, whom Finzi met in Milan on the occasion of one of his exhibitions at the Apollinaire gallery, the gestural turbulence and expressive urgency calmed down and a more reflective dimension took over in the direction of a overcoming painting itself, with the approach to Gestalt theories on the phenomenology of perception. The principles of optical art informed his research on optical suggestion until 1978. In 1980, painting regained the dominant space with a subsequent alternation of color and non-color, of light and darkness that competed for the surface of the work. Black is placed as the light of darkness, of emptiness, of silence and leads him to probe the most secret resonances of the non-existent on the invisibility of painting itself. He began to exhibit in 1949 at the Bevilacqua La Masa foundation in Venice where in 1956 held his first solo exhibition. He participated, upon invitation, in 1959 and 2000, at the Rome Quadrennial and in 1986 at the XLII Venice Art Biennale. The last important personal exhibition was held in 2005 in Urbino in the rooms of the Palazzo Ducale.
