Imola, January 2025 – In consideration of the growing number of visitors who reached the San Domenico Museum in Imola during the Christmas holidays to visit the exhibition “Nicola Verlato. Myth generation” and of the considerable interest that the event
exhibition is arousing towards the public and critics, Imola Musei announces the extension of the exhibition – the closure was initially scheduled for January 19th – until Sunday 2 February 2025.
Curated by the director of Imola Musei, Diego Galizziand organized by the Municipality of Imola – Imola Musei thanks to the support of the Giovanni Bonelli Gallery of Milan, Myth Generation presents more than fifty works specially selected to best represent the artist’s expressive path: mostly paintings, but also drawings and sculptures. This is the most important mid-career anthological exhibition of the artist after the recent exhibition events which saw him as protagonist at the Baths of Diocletian and at the Maschio Angioino in Naples.
Painter, sculptor and digital artist, Nicola Verlato (Verona, 1965) is known internationally for his particular research focused on the relationship between painting, plastic arts and new media, proposing a new and surprising aesthetic
ante, inspired partly by Renaissance and seventeenth-century art, partly by contemporary stimuli drawn from cinema, cartoons, video games and virtual reality technologies.
“We have the opportunity to admire an artist of international caliber in Imola – comments the Councilor for Culture Giacomo Gambi – and the
public is responding with great interest and curiosity. The extension of the exhibition will give those who have not yet done so the opportunity to discover Verlato’s surprising art, as well as the extraordinary permanent collections of the San Domenico Museum”.
Verlato’s is a highly original, astonishing and in some ways irreverent language, which deals with the rapidly changing modern world and with the narratives of our time, identifying stories and subjects that can embody a sort of contemporary mythology. Between pop surrealism, academicism and visionary hyperrealism, the artist investigates our constantly changing imagination and the processes of formation of the mythologies of yesterday and today, offering his brush to their need to take shape through art. Observing modernity with its narratives, developing new images, without preconceptions or foreclosures, extracting them from ordinary time to insert them into the permanent dimension of myth. This is Verlato’s creative path, and to complete it he necessarily looks to antiquity and how the hero protagonists of oral traditions settled in the consciences of men and took possession of space through the process of formalization of artists. This is where the intense cycle on display in the exhibition dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini was born, the protagonist with his very existence and his death of a sort of sacrifice of poetic art, or the interest in some pop icons of our time, such as James Dean, leader of a series of dramatic images that allude to our destinies apparently attracted towards the precipice.
Strengthened by a figurative culture that was formed through the study of the great artistic tradition of the past, from ancient statuary to Renaissance art up to Pontormo and Caravaggio, Verlato combines the iconography and canons of classical art with a universe of contemporary visual suggestions, giving rise to surprising and high-impact combinations, rich in contamination with the world of science fiction, comics, video games and 3D modeling technologies.
“The imaginative strength of Verlato – comments the curator of the exhibition Diego Galizzi – cannot leave us indifferent. Chaotic and tension-filled scenes, scratchy atmospheres, irreverent combinations, spectacular light effects, Michelangelo-esque bodies that seem to live in an eternal restlessness. In these paintings we relive the echoes of an ancestral past that continually resurface, reinterpreted and sometimes distorted, but in the foreground there is always a constant and that is the figure of Man, with his values but also with his moral disorder. With this astonishing mix of classicism and allegorical surrealism Verlato manages to give shape to the instability of today and to prefigure future scenarios
reflecting itself in a mythical past that never ceases to fascinate us“.
For the Councilor for Culture Giacomo Gambi, “after the great exhibition dedicated to Bertozzi&Casoni, Imola Musei returns to open up to contemporary art trends. This important exhibition on Nicola Verlato gives us the opportunity to present to the public an authoritative exponent, of international standing, of the strong return of figurative painting in today’s art. What fascinates and strikes in his paintings is the bold, at times brazen, proposal with which he manages to masterfully combine the gaze on today’s civilization and the re-enactment, cyclical as it is irresistible, of the myth. His works demonstrate that the stories, tensions and contradictions of the contemporary world can be effectively represented in a difficult balance between order and disorder, through a convinced fidelity to the great pictorial tradition of the past, both from a technical and linguistic point of view.” .
Until February 2, 2025 it will be possible to visit the exhibition “Nicola Verlato. Myth Generation” with the following times: Friday from 3pm to 7pm; Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 1pm and from 3pm to 7pm. The ticket entitles you to access the permanent collections of the San Domenico Museum (City Art Collections and Giuseppe Scarabelli Museum).
Nicola Verlato is a painter, sculptor, architect, musician born in Verona in 1965. He began modeling sculptures, drawing and painting very early. At the age of 9 he sold his first works. From the age of 9 to 14 he studied painting in the studio of an elderly friar (Fra Terenzio, born Quirino Barbone) in a monastery in Lonigo, in the province of Vicenza. He studied lute and composition at the conservatories of Verona and Padua. He studied architecture at the University of Venice. At the age of 15 he exhibited at his first exhibition in an institutional venue. Subsequently he worked for aristocratic Venetian families, creating portraits and large compositions for palaces and villas as well as decorations and sets for large events. He entered the contemporary art system only later, exhibiting in galleries and museums internationally. Among the numerous exhibition occasions, the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the Prague and Tirana Biennials, the Rome Quadrennial in 1996 and 2008, the Exhibitions at the Royal Palace in Milan, at the PAC and at the MART, at the National Museum in Stockholm , and Helsinki, the Nuit Blanche in Toronto, the Akron Museum and the White Columns in New York, the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, the National Gallery of Matera and the Maschio Angioino in Naples as well as numerous others. His works are present in the collections of the MART Museum in Rovereto, the George Lucas Museum in Los Angeles, the Musac in Salamanca and the Iloilo Museum (Philippines). He has collaborated, among others, with Fiat and Gatorade, in advertising campaigns based on his pictorial style. He has directed music videos, advertising campaigns and designed sets for music videos. His work is represented by Giovanni Bonelli Gallery in Italy and Morten Poulsen Gallery in Copenhagen. After 14 years spent in Venice, 7 in Milan, 7 in New York and 7 in Los Angeles, he now lives and works in Rome. His work is eminently figurative and hinges on the materialization of modern and ancient narratives and mythologies, wanting to demonstrate the absolute continuity of the central themes of humanity which continually adapt to the changes of time while maintaining their recognizability in art. To make his works increasingly effective for the widest possible perception from a social point of view, since 1992 he began to implement his working process with new CGI technologies. In this field he is certainly a pioneer, if not the first ever to have married traditional painting and digital modeling. Some of his most important projects are based on the integration of traditional painting and digital modeling and on the aesthetic influence of video games in contemporary art. He has held lectures and conferences in various institutions including: Academies of Florence, Rome and Verona, SVA of New York, Conference of architecture and urbanism in Toronto, Gnomon School Los Angeles, Villa D’este Tivoli, Museo Macro Rome, IIC Los Angeles . He taught painting for a few semesters at the New York Academy in New York where he introduced students and teachers to the implementation of CGI and traditional painting.
Carlo Franza