Antonia Jannone Architectural Drawings of Milan presents “RED EARTH” until June 13, 2024, a new exhibition of Velasco Vitali focused on the artist's production dedicated to clay tennis courts.
In everyone's imagination, grass is a tennis paradise, the stage on which grace, elegance and lightness are staged, while red clay is an arena of expiation, where the game becomes fatigue, sweat and often torment.
Vitali's production dedicated to the world of tennis begins in 2017, when the artist rents a new studio with a greenhouse and a real tennis court: the latter will be a source of inspiration for him for paintings entitled square or court, compositions strictly monochrome on variations of red, which Gianni Clerici also recounts in the volume Il Tennis nell'Arte (Mondadori 2018).
In the following years, the cycle of paintings was enriched with a new title: Terra Rossa, a reference to “Красный квадрат” (Red Square), universally known as “red square”, one of Kazimir's most famous paintings
Malevich.
Activating a new imaginative state, with this exhibition Vitali embarks on a new journey in his painting by shifting attention to the tender and crumbly matter of color and the dusty nature of red ocher. The compositions of these paintings refer to fragments or angular cuts of tennis courts, to vast fields of a single color rearticulated by geometries of white lines that redesign the context: painting thus becomes a means of activating the imagination, and the color metaphor of art as well as sport.
Red earth offers us a key to understanding, a stimulus to question the power of images in the contemporary era and how new visions can be imagined starting from this earth colour, which transforms the playing field into an archetypal dimension: in these works the color gets to its essence with the task of telling or imagining, playing only with the material that composes it.
The volume was presented on the occasion of the exhibition Red earth,Of Matteo Codignola And Velasco Vitali Editions Henry Beyle.
“If we really want to talk about dreams, and when tennis is involved, we are talking about dreams, the recurring one for each of us is an empty, immaculate court, right before a match gets it dirty – he claims Matteo Codignola – Empty and possibly smooth, without worn areas or rubber marks, without anything. Just the lines, the grid, and the land“.
Carlo Franza