TOMMASO BET E MARCO LODOLA

Installation view of the exhibition TOMMASO BET AND AN HOMAGE TO MARCO LODOLA.
Myths of the Contemporary
CASTELLO DEL MONFERRATO
CASALE MONFERRATO (AL)
9th JULY – 4th SEPTEMBER 2022

TOMMASO BET e MARCO LODOLA
ONLINE EXHIBITION

Bluart Gallery is pleased to present an online e-commerce exhibition that promotes and pays tribute to this important painter of contemporary life in dialogue with a fine selection of Marco Lodola’s “Luminous,” to address in parallel the theme of myths, more or less false, of contemporaneity.

“I am afraid of the lack of empathy between people, of the fact that everything really has a price and of the commodification of human values, when men carry out orders against other men as if they were machines without conscience. Emotion is the only hope for regaining humanity, and in addition to drama, it can be activated by the beauty of discovery, by music and image precisely.”
TOMMASO BET

For the collocation of the painting of the young Tommaso Bet, an artist from Friuli who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, we could speak with certainty of an artist of the present time, but belonging to that second interpretation, called platonic started by predecessors such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

“In my intentions these portraits are masks, faces of a commercial and present-day beauty, concealing, distracting from a carnal substructure, which instead represents the feral, potentially monstrous side of the human soul. I fix in my works the Luciferian fascination in the dichotomy between demon and lamb.”
Tommaso Bet

There is no refreshment for your senses in Bet’s works, any more than there is for your hearing after resting a vinyl by the Cro-Mags, pioneers of New York hardcore, on the platter. It is not music for docile ears, it is not painting for mundane looks. It is strong tones and colors, dried by the rhetoric of an art that, to please, must not disturb.
No, Thomas Bet does disturb.

He, a real painter who paints another real.

MARCO LODOLA

The element that has made and makes Lodola’s figures even more perentorical and suasive is the encounter with light” (Gillo Dorfles).

“If you try to ask Marco Lodola how it is that he decided to work with light he will surprisingly answer that he decided it by looking at Beato Angelico’s Madonnas.

“In these two flashes of critical texts dedicated to the work of Marco Lodola, a neo-futurist (as the critic Renato Barilli “classified” by placing him among the founders in the early 1980s of that movement born in Luciano Inga Pin’s Milan gallery), there is the synthesis of a research that does not forget the lessons of Balla or Depero, but adds an electric wire and current.

In Lodola’s works there is the mystique of light (the one that, painted, envelops Beato Angelico’s Madonnas with eternity). But there is also the light that goes to the heart of forms, redesigning space. Lucio Fontana understood this in his time, that light does not mind unnecessary frills in the spatial communication of art: take a trip to the top floor of the Museo del Novecento in Milan and look at the ceiling.

Neon lines-light draw space, what master Lucius imagined there was beyond the cut, beyond the very end of God. Light, a legacy that has been picked up by the contemporary Pavia’s artist: thanks to the power of neon, in Marco Lodola’s works even Spider Man or Super Man indulge in luminous metaphysics.

Marco Lodola, the luminous master of contemporary art, when he goes on stage, he does so with the rhythm of a show between music and color. Light music (but classy: catchy and intriguing at the same time). Music that becomes art, between pop and new futurism (the area defined by critic Renato Barilli).

ALL WORKS

TOMMASO BET

Tommaso Bet is an Italian artist, born in 1980, originary in Sacile, Friuli.
After finishing the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice with his thesis “Evocation, the primacy of intaglio, semiotic analysis on the Art print,” he won a scholarship as a tutor at the chair of G. Quaresimin, the same year he was the last and youngest member to be admitted to Giorgio Trentin’s historic association of Venetian Engravers.
In 2008 he moved first to Zurich and then to London, continuing to develop his artistic research, combining pictorial and graphic techniques.
From 2013 he began collaborating with Giovanni Granzotto and Studio d’Arte GR.
He currently lives and produces his works in Sacile, as well as collaborating since 2017 oltreoceano with GR-Gallery in New York.
He exhibits in major national and international fairs and exhibitions, collaborating with galleries and important public and private exhibition spaces.
In Tommaso Bet’s technique, graphic and pictorial training merge in a dialogue between disciplines, techniques and materials. In the subjects of the works lives an aesthetic dualism composed of the coexistence of different expressive languages.
The material violence of the color scratched with the palette knife and the precision of the brushes dialogue, creating a dance between seemingly unamalgamable styles.

In both figurative and abstract works, the connivance between two drives is experienced.
The violent textural trowels that form the foundation of the work, representing the violent and sublime nature of the real world, wild and immature, instinctive and violent.
In opposition to it, painting and drawing seek to tame and give order to the starting chaos, like reason that wants to bring order and tame the hostile and wild world.
A duality emerges from the subjects of the canvases, testifying to the search for a balance between chaos and order, image and matter, an energetic balancing act aimed at seeking a dynamic equilibrium between Dionysian and Apollonian.
This dialogue between opposites fuels the perceptual dichotomy that constitutes the soul Bet’s art work, the beautiful and the beast merge into a single being, testifying to the decadent and disillusioned view that contraposition and contradiction are the foundational basis of the nature of human experience.
The artistic production is characterized by portraiture of large female faces and subjects of the strong gothic, cyberpunk and pop variegations, and by large abstract canvases in which powerful compositions of chromatic architectures and pareidolies are expressed.

MARCO LODOLA

Marco Lodola was born in Dorno (Pavia). He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and Milan, concluding his studies by discussing a thesis on the Fauves, who with Matisse would be a reference point for his work, along with Fortunato Depero and Beato Angelico. He has exhibited in some of the major Italian and European cities such as Rome, Milan, Florence, Bologna, Lyon, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam.

He has participated in exhibitions and projects for major industries such as Swatch, Coca Cola, Ferrari, Titan, Grafoplast, Harley Davidson, Ducati, Riva, Illy, Francis – Francis, Dash, Carlsberg, Nonino, Valentino, Coveri, Fabbri, I Mirabili, Shenker, Seat, Lauretana, Smemoranda, Gierre Milano and socks Gallo and Ferrarelle. Several are his collaborations with contemporary writers including Aldo Busi, Claudio Apone, Marco Lodoli, Giuseppe Pulina, Tiziano Scarpa and Giuseppe Cederna, and with musicians: Max Pezzali’s 883, Timoria, Gianluca Grignani, Jovanotti, Andy (Bluvertigo), Syria, Nick the Nightfly, Steve Vai, RON, Negramaro.