Yves Larocque, Rain on Sinalunga, 2008)

Kangaroos, Beavers and Gorgonzola; a Studio Italia Alumni Exhibit

A Studio Italia Alumni Ottawa Canada opening on March 5th 2011 ; 42 artists from two hemispheres will be showing their paintings done during Studio Italia, our painting workshop in Tuscany offered every June and October since 1997.  This exhibit stresses the beauty of Tuscany, the importance of creativity in our daily lives and the concept of living an art experience in Italy. It also witnesses that attending one of our workshops is also creating lifelong relationships.

This exhibit asks the following question. In our era of the Internet, digitized art and installations, what is it that compels an individual to repeat this gesture known since time immemorial, this act of setting up an easel, mounting a blank canvas and applying colour?

Deemed dead and gone thirty years ago with the emergence of the pop, kinetic, twelve-note and conceptual arts of every shape and stripe, this gesture lives on. And the question too lives on, and will live on. In the context of this exhibit, what were the painters thinking to pour their hearts and souls—not to mention their time, energy and money—into a Studio Italia painting workshop in the centre of Tuscany? 10 days of painting? Far from home? Disconnected from family? On an archaic farm dating from the High Renaissance? What is it that provokes the act of painting for these 42 artists who have

Krystyna Ciesiolkewicz, Departure from Tuscany, oil on canvas (2010), 6 " x 6 "

come here to Ottawa, Canada, to exhibit canvases painted in Italy by Australians, Canadians and one Italian?

This exhibition not only offers the spectator something to look at and to experience, but also hopes to ignite a desire to see, to search into what was seen. Italy, where these canvases were born, provided a starting point, a first time, a vanishing point—vanishing in the two directions of space and self. The beauty of this country—for only beauty can transport—made it possible to target on both the imagery and this spiritual quest. But it is only the country’s vast and wild expanses that enable us to go one step further: here the horizon is so inescapable for it is up to us to say whether or not to establish a vanishing point and, if so, where. Why not erect huge canvases on the dunes of the Libyan Desert? Why not push this landscape that has yet to be born further into “pre-prerealism,” where the horizon is moot, into the world of quantum physics, of Rothko and Pollock, who decided all on their own to dwell there permanently? These are the kinds of questions we raise in the workshops of icscis/walkthearts.

All sells from the exhibit will be donated to the German de Paz Foundation in Colombia.