Luciano Sopelsa Biography
Luciano Sopelsa (1921 - ?) is a Venetian artist born in 1921. After attending the Art School of Venice, in 1940 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice under the guidance of Maestro Saetti, whose assistant he soon became creation of cartoons and frescoes. The experience with the Maestro profoundly marks Sopelsa, in the way of working, of feeling the colors, of remaining suspended between atmospheres of emotional enchantment and dreamy yet true reality, but also in the technical curiosity, in the loyalty to the "profession" of an artist. A "profession" inextricably linked to the cultivation, exercise, strengthening and refinement of the senses, the eye and the hand, the search for synesthesia capable of nourishing intelligence and original and creative thought, and of inventing figural syntheses and colors of effective expressiveness and communication. Luciano Sopelsa dedicated himself to fresco and mosaic for a long time, initially following Maestro Saetti and then obtaining his own commissions which allowed him to create numerous works. Saetti's teaching is clear, very clear at the beginning, but it does not constitute the only poetic and technical reference of Luciano who, already in the 1960s, demonstrated a matured autonomous personality, constantly in search of a harmonious, narrative, popularly colloquial form: female nudes, maternity, harlequins, Viae Crucis, crucifixions are the most frequent themes. Finally, in Asiago, Luciano discovers red marble and the desire to sculpt. And in this material, usually difficult for sculptors, precisely because it is too demanding pictorially, Sopelsa has rediscovered the 'musicality' of volumes, of plastic movements, of gestures, of atmospheres, of the sliding of light on the surfaces of solid, matriarchal female figures.
