PAINTING LIGHT
Burano and its Painters

From 6 April 2019 to 28 February 2021
Burano, Lace Museum

Curated by Chiara Squarcina and Elisabetta Barisoni

In the last century, Burano, the most ‘island-like’ of all the islands in the Venetian lagoon, became a highly inspirational setting for artists such as Gino Rossi, Umberto Moggioli and Pio Semeghini. The exhibition will present works by these painters and others, in which nature and landscapes take on a particular intensity as the brushstrokes physically dissolve to become the equivalent of light.

Based on the works from the collection atthe Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – Ca’ Pesaro, the exhibition focuses on art that took Burano and its painting prize to the centre of an important and lively post-World War II debate on modern art. It all began between 1900 and 1910, when the island became closely connected with the Ca’ Pesaro avant-garde movement. It was the era of Gino Rossi, Arturo Martini, Ugo Valeri, Luigi Scopinich, Umberto Moggioli, Felice Casorati, and in subsequent years, Pio Semeghini.

The significance of the island to these Burano artists is what the exhibition Painting Light. Burano and its Painters intends to illustrate. It was a time like no other for the island as it assumed a reputation as an idyllic place where an intense desire took hold to paint the poetic vision of nature solely en plein air. In order to transpose these dreamlike influences, Burano became imprisoned in this vision of spiritual refuge, a paradise captured in its ethereal state, immersed in a ‘bubble of light’ as a means of reaffirming its unwitting beauty: a tenuous, profound and intimately reflective vision.