Carmelo Zotti Biography
Carmelo Zotti was born in Trieste in 1933 to an Istrian father and a Cypriot mother. Having spent his childhood in his hometown and subsequently in Naples in 1945, he moved to Venice where, as a pupil of Bruno Saetti, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1954, revealing himself to be one of the most promising young artists, he won the first prize of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa; 1956 was his first participation, with three paintings, at the Venice Biennale, while in 1958 he won first prize at the International Youth Biennale and the Longo Prize at the XXXII International Venice Biennale. These recognitions inaugurate a long and prestigious exhibition activity which, in addition to seeing him present in the most important national and international exhibitions, is dotted with numerous solo exhibitions including the retrospective at the Cà Pesaro Museum of Modern Art in Venice (1995) and the anthology at the Museo della Permanente in Milan (2007). From the beginning, Zotti's painting broke away from provincial methods and soon took on a European tone, especially in a symbolic-surreal direction. Zotti's propensity towards a mythical and fabulous world marked by a reconquered proto-Mediterraneanness was born in Venice; this propensity, which the artist accentuated with his multiple experiences in Egypt, India, Burma and Mexico, and already favored during the years of the Academy by the closeness of a master like Saetti, who oriented him towards an unreal and sumptuous in colour, with a Byzantine background. Zotti's emotional and sensual temperament first led him to accentuate sign and chromatic symbolism with a painting based on psychic impulses and "memories" filtered through oriental culture. Therefore, starting from the mid-1960s, his peculiar way was increasingly outlined in a re-enactment, in a dreamlike and metaphysical key, of a fabulous world rich in ancestral references, in which some symbolic elements (the pyramid, the sphinx, the elephant) are repeated in variations and deformations that are sometimes lyrical and sometimes monstrous. Subsequently Zotti made the sign more nervous and free, the color brighter and looser, giving an expressionist character to his representations, which continue to be inspired by an intimate world made up of personal experiences, visionary and mythical transfigurations. In short, a progressive coherent development of a pictorial action which finds confirmation in the seriousness of his human commitment, in the high results achieved from time to time. Over the years, Zotti's artistic and existential maturation has led his painting - which has become increasingly "theatrical" and characterized by a primordial sense of color - to follow completely autonomous ways and times, almost against the current, developing a language that is certainly not homologable, in which figuration and abstraction, memory and history, coexist happily from the beginning. He held the chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice from 1973 to 1990. On 16 May 2007 he passed away in his home in Treviso while the anthology dedicated to him was still underway in the Galleria Civica of Palazzo Loffredo in Power.
