The Mark in Color
The sign in the color
by Veronica Zanardi
With the exhibition Claudio Verna – Carte, the Museo Butti | Contemporanea presents a reflection on the artist’s graphic work, developed over more than fifty years of pictorial exploration.
The eighteen works on paper on display retrace Verna’s research from the late 1950s to his most recent expressive outcomes, in a journey where graphic and pictorial expressions have evolved in parallel. The moments dedicated to one or the other do not overlap but alternate.
For Verna, working on paper is an autonomous field of experience: it does not precede painting as a separate entity but is part of it. The central theme remains painting, enriched by the intermittent presence of the mark—an element that defines a structure through the mark-color, beyond any hierarchical relationship.
Thus, a fusion between graphic mark and painting is established, where gesture, light, and the immediacy of movement become foundational elements, allowing us to experience and perceive an artwork as a singular entity. This is, above all, what Claudio Verna offers through his lifelong work.
The works on display immediately reveal that his gestures do not materialize as neatly arranged color swatches or as carefully mapped traces leading to the heart of some ultimate truth. Instead, the pastels offer a glimpse into mystery—into what will or could happen to the mark once the artist has set in motion, by hand, the uninterrupted process from which flows of energy emerge.
As early as his marker works from 1959, the mark hovers in search of a place to proliferate. The sheet becomes a swarm of cosmic insects, their trajectories imprinting on the space around them—a discovery of a function of drawing that was already deeply felt but not yet fully revealed.
Throughout his relentless exploration, the mark and the graphic field become structurally defined as intrinsically connected entities—not simply interrelated functions, but a single whole searching for an element perhaps hidden within the depths of an ancestral memory, yet still charged with unifying energy. The works on paper from the 1970s are particularly significant in this regard.
By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Verna’s marks become sparse. As they take on color, they immediately find their natural position on the paper’s background, settling there while maintaining the directional imprint of their common origin—this is the moment when intuition gives birth to an image.
What might have eluded observation until then suddenly fractures, settles, and then reassembles in a new, vital gesture. These are the moments when everything seems to expand and lose measure, when each fragment of a mark can, on its own, fill the entire visual field—so powerful is the collective vibration of each gesture.
In his 2016–17 works, the paper is infused with a kind of atmospheric dust, the result of overlapping networks of marks, weaves, and warps. These either dissipate or coagulate into a brittle substance, ultimately transforming into flows of light imbued with a completeness that demands no commentary, only contemplation.
Often, the anarchic nature of the mark reveals the artist’s intent to reset everything—to start again, not from an informal representation of emotional moments, but from the very source of primary energy, from the moment capable of generating the mark that illuminates everything around it.
It is precisely this anarchy, charged with vital tension, that ensures the depth of his research—so that everything represented is infused with an undeniable impulse toward discovery.
There are works where an explosion of energy takes on the brilliance of a saffron pistil’s yellow—where the vital impulse manifests itself in infinite possible variations of its own expression. These images radiate extraordinary tension: the mark, as much as possible, identifies with a primal gesture—the one that marked a beginning. The air is still. Only the light bursts forth; only the tracing gesture moves. It cannot be heard, but one can perceive the dynamic scent of what is taking shape.
There is never anything redundant, nothing that suggests excess. Everything is dry and essential, guided by the energy emanating from the mark.
When the visual field becomes almost a homogeneous body through the dense layering of segments, perceptible only by the slightest variations of hue and light, Verna prevents a fracture between the external time of the observer and the internal time of the work. These two temporal dimensions must not move at different paces but must, through synchronous motion, reveal the perpetual metamorphosis of mark and color.
Painting “live,” an expression of freedom
by Massimo Bignardi
A little over a year later, I return to writing about Claudio Verna’s artistic journey, choosing as a focal point his continuous and prolific incursions into drawing—particularly in the practice of pastels. Introducing this further reflection is an unpublished letter the artist sent to Daniela Fonti, curator of the retrospective exhibition dedicated to Verna’s pastels from 1966 to 2000, held between December of that year and January 2001 at the historic Carraresi-Brittoni museum complex in Treviso.
The first aspect the artist highlights, returning to it several times, is the necessity of making “mark and color” coincide—seeking to accelerate a semiotic value that is primarily, if not exclusively, expressive. He does so by resorting to colors charged, on an aesthetic level, with a physical energy that conveys agitation, such as red, and even more so black, which by definition is a “non-color.” With black, he created the series dedicated to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, drawings from the late 1950s. After that period, color regained its primary role—expressive, as Itten would have said, meaning capable of communicating the inexpressible. Verna himself adds that it gives the mark both “body” and “substance.”
Expression thus becomes presence in the mark, in its physicality, while simultaneously becoming language through the color we perceive in its retinal value. A mark-color, due to its immediacy and rapid compositional nature, differs from the inherent character of his paintings, where, as the artist recalls, “it is the color itself that contains the structure of the painting.”
The pastel technique reduces the distance between the hand, the fingers, and the paper’s surface. By eliminating any additional ‘prosthesis’ (such as the brush), it intensifies the thrust into the intangible space of the white sheet. It is no coincidence that Verna compares the pastel technique to modeling clay—not as a mere metaphor to explain a technical aspect but as an actual sensation: feeling the colored substance in a mental space, where the scale of volumes relies on proximity or distance, on emotional states. The artist himself invites such reflection in his 2010 essay How I Paint, published in the journal Quaderni di Arte Contemporanea, stating:
“I have always thought that culture, thought, and experiences, at a certain point, become part of your very nature and allow you to capture impulses that arise from deep within, perhaps remaining obscure for a long time.”
The pastels presented in this exhibition outline a well-balanced synthesis, highlighting the transitional moments in Verna’s compositional choices—elements he has added or subtracted over time. This significant yet concise journey begins with a series of black marker drawings from 1959. These were crucial and challenging years for art, as the existential tension of historical Informalism had by then exhausted itself. In those automatic, tangled, wiry marks—resembling bundles of barbed wire—one can perceive what Pierre Restany wrote in the same year about gestural painting: the “ideal necessity for liberation and complete self-expression, which paradoxically leads to the most exclusive union between the artist and the artwork.”
The focus then shifts to the 1970s, where a structural element begins to emerge, as seen in the two pastels from 1976, including Studio per Nero tre, and in the 1974 paper collage. As I have previously written, these are the years when Verna established himself as one of the main interpreters of Analytical Painting, securing recognition both nationally and internationally. Through a compositional simplicity entirely dedicated to considering the means and practice of painting, Verna does not seek validation from the phenomenal world, nor does he drift into the fluid currents of abstraction. Rather, he aims to express an emotional process in constant renewal.
The exhibition documents his later works, from the late 1980s and 1990s, with a pastel from 1989—where the freedom of gesture expands its energy—and a work on paper from 1992, where the mark-color weave becomes denser. This focus extends to works from the early 21st century. A striking pastel from 2007 features an intricate interplay of fine marks on the right and left edges, organizing the central chromatic field. Meanwhile, Discorso sul segno: allegoria (2018), a large oil pastel, employs a single color—orange—allowing the artist to emphasize the oily density of the mark, the interplay of fullness and void, and the irregular alternation of horizontal and vertical weaves.
Verna’s attempt is to underscore, with utmost clarity, the idea of “direct engagement” (presa diretta). I believe he means being present in the field, within the micro-space where what Merleau-Ponty called the “enigma of visibility” in painting is affirmed. Here, visibility should not be understood merely as a perceptual phenomenon but rather as a fundamentally cultural process—one that translates into the perfect synthesis of consciousness.
