These paintings must be considered within the context of the cultural and art-historical moment of their creation, a moment of strong reaction- which began in the early seventies- against the non-figurative, or abstract, language which then had absolute predominance in Italy and in the western world.
With the decline of these styles ( used by some artists with exceptional results) figurative paintings has been resurrected after decades of silence, having been seen as a refuge of academic tradition or as a literary, illustrative tool.
This return to the figurative is happening right before our eyes and as many and varied ways of expression. The most definite, the most easy to identify, of these is Hyperrealism, often violent and now already in a phase of of fragmentation, breaking up into a series of different channels of experimentation. It would take too long here to discuss the relationship between the fall of abstraction (and the avant-garde in general) and the decline of leftist political currents linked with the Soviet Union; the idealism lost any validity from the seventies onwards.
However, it is worth nothing that this is the second experience in European history of a return to figurative painting following a period of abstract, intellectual, anti-naturalist, arid cerebral formulæ.
A precedent was established towards the end of the XVIth century with the decline of Mannerism which had a leading influence, lasting about seventy years, in a period fraught with heavy political tension created by the opposing forces of Protestant Reformation.
One of the most singular aspects of this return to figurative painting at the end of the XVIth century was, of course, the birth of the Still-Life which grew as an autonomous genre in Italy and Netherlands.
In Italy, both in Rome and Lombardy, the Still Life was born within the context of the circle and work of that supreme genius of XVIth century realism, Michelangelo da Caravaggio; in the Netherlands the more spectacular examples were painted in Antwerp at the times of Peter Paul Rubens, whose Art marked the end of Mannerism in Nothern Europe.
How should Luciano Ventrone’s painting be classified?
It’s roots undoubtedly lie in the now outdated period of Hyperrealism itself; there is, thought, clear evidence that his work is able to greatly surpass it and hence avoid its pitfalls.
These still lifes are not taken directly from objective reality, rather a rediscovery of it through the optical mechanisms of photography.
Although we are often unaware of it, or visual perception is today modified and conditioned by the products of mechanical reproduction and the media; our vision of the outside world is filtered by photography, colour printing, cinema and television.
This filter is neither abolished nor ignored in the work of Luciano Ventrone; on the contrary, it is accentuated and serves as an aid to a rediscovery of the realities of nature in all of its visual and tactile aspects; life, colour, transparency, density.
The subjects of these compositions stand out with extraordinary force against a background often reminiscent of the endless, lightless depth of cosmic space.
These are paintings which ask us to remain in harmony with an environment which is no longer our traditional one, but one that has been altered by machines, altered because of the breakthrough of those spaces limits within which we have lived until now.
