CLAUDIO OLIVIERI – VEDERE A OLTRANZA

THE EXHIBITION

curated by Veronica Zanardi and Matteo Galbiati
in collaboration with the Claudio Olivieri Archive
MUSEO BUTTI | CONTEMPORANEA
Viale Varese 4, Viggiù (VA)

Opening
Sunday, 5 October, from 11:00 a.m.

The Butti | Contemporanea Museum inaugurates its new exhibition season with an anthological exhibition dedicated to Claudio Olivieri.
The Butti | Contemporanea Museum is pleased to announce the reopening of its exhibition season with an important anthological exhibition dedicated to Claudio Olivieri (1934-2019), the undisputed protagonist of Analytical Painting. The exhibition, curated by conservator Veronica Zanardi and art critic Matteo Galbiati, offers a visual and critical journey through nine canvases and twelve papers, works selected to provide a representative overview of the artist’s pictorial research.
The initiative is in line with the museum’s cultural identity, which finds a central theme in Analytical Painting, consistent with the legacy of its founder Gottardo Ortelli (1938-2003). The Butti | Contemporanea Museum has already devoted attention to this line of research with a monographic exhibition on Claudio Verna (1937), another leading figure in the movement, thus reaffirming a continuity of exploration that finds further value in the historical link between the two artists, who have also been featured together in significant exhibitions in the past.
The exhibition benefits from the critical contribution of Prof. Galbiati, author of the text published in the fifth volume of the editorial series ‘I quaderni del Butti’.
The exhibition begins with one of his earliest canvases, dated 1958, accompanied by delicate ink studies on tissue paper, before focusing on his iconic works from the 1970s and 1980s, decades that established Olivieri as one of the most important exponents of Analytical Painting in Italy. The exhibition concludes with a significant canvas from 1994, one from 2008 and two papers from the 1990s, which testify to the consistency and evolution of his language up to its most mature results; the exhibition thus offers a complete and articulated testimony of the artist’s entire creative arc.
Matteo Galbiati writes, ‘(…) Colour was, therefore, the true and original medium of his painted poetry, an exclusive conduit on which to pour extreme trust in order to try to grasp, in lyrical terms, a distant, elusive principle of truth. For him, colour could also be a vulnerable, susceptible, alterable, impermanent element which, expressing itself in an almost infinite range of constantly evolving and changing colours, broadened the scope of his expressive abilities each time, transforming a goal into a new beginning, a limit into a frontier.”
Olivieri’s art develops in the continuous tension between light and dark, between visible and invisible, in a pictorial practice that transcends pure perception, ‘(…) In darkness and light, he searches for the deep breath of light that has always drawn him: alchemically hermetic, his colours find their raison d’être in the mysterious flickering of light. The luminous factor, after all, gives and grants, but also takes away and subtracts from his painting something that makes it perfect and precise in that courageous and daring dispute with colour. (…) It is not just a perceptual hypothesis and, for this reason, agreeing to cross the dimensional threshold of the visible requires light to be an active, true and concrete substance.”

Claudio Olivieri was born in Rome in 1934. He spent his childhood in Mantua, his mother’s hometown, and in 1953 he moved to Milan, where he attended the Brera Academy and graduated in Painting. He began his career in the field of informal, gestural and sign painting. In 1960, he held his first solo exhibition at the Salone Annunciata in Milan.
From that moment on, he exhibited his work intensely and constantly, holding numerous solo exhibitions in galleries, museums and public spaces in Italy and abroad. In 1966, he was invited to exhibit some of his works at the Venice Biennale, where he returned in 1980 and 1990 with a personal exhibition, and again in 1986 in the colour section. He is considered one of the leading exponents of Italian Analytical Painting and has participated in important group exhibitions and events such as the Rome Quadriennale (1973) and Documenta in Kassel (1977). His pictorial production is also accompanied by the elaboration of various writings. From 1993 to 2011, he held the chair of Visual Arts and Painting at the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, the city where he lived until December 2019. In 2021, the anthological exhibition “Infinito Visibile” (Infinite Visible) was held at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, curated by the Claudio Olivieri Archive, which was established by Eleonora Olivieri in 2020 and directed by Arianna Baldoni.