Italo Valenti

Born in Milan, he studied in Venice and Milan. He enriched his artistic background travelling to Paris and in Belgium, where he discovered Cézanne and the impressionist and post-impressionist painting.

He adhered, along with important artists and intellectuals in the movement of Current, typically characterized by the civil and social commitment of the Expressionist art to overcome the rhetoric of Italian art. In the years of the movement, the distinctive feature of his figurative painting – already aimed at the stylization of the figure in the direction of abstract art – stood in a form of lyrical dream populated by primitivist people as witches, the series of cerfs volant, the moons, the theaters, the stations and the boats.

Valenti moved to Tessin, to Ascona, and met Jean Arp, Ben Nicholson, Remo Rossi and Julius Bissier; the association with this group of artists led him to a gradual rethinking of his painting, researching the effects of color and space that led him to a phase of “informal lyrical abstraction “, in which the subjects of fantastic primitivism float and break up into triangles, trapezoids, diamonds, primordial symbols and enigmatic: that’s how abstract collages of the last artistic production were created.