Museo Butti | Contemporanea, Viggiù (VA)

[Rivista Segno. Attualità internazionale d’arte contemporanea n.299, gen-feb 2025, p.73, di Veronica Zanardi]

The exhibition Claudio Verna. Carte, on view from November 24 through February 9, concludes the first year of activity—following the relaunch after the redevelopment of the new exhibition venue—of the historic museum which, this past September, celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its inauguration, reaffirming its commitment to being an active participant in the world of art and to enriching not only the local artistic and cultural scene.

In this sense, the retrospective dedicated to Claudio Verna’s works on paper is particularly meaningful: the artist, already a key figure in Analytical Painting, holds an important place in the international art landscape.

The works on display bear witness to a body of research that developed both in graphic and pictorial expressions: Verna alternates between one practice and the other—they do not overlap.

For the painter, work on paper constitutes an autonomous field of experience, which does not precede painting by distancing itself from it, but rather is part of it: the theme remains painting, to which even the intermittences of the mark contribute, establishing a structure through the sign-color, beyond any relationship of subordination.
A fusion thus arises between graphic mark and painting, whereby the gesture, the color, the immediacy of movement—all that happens—is nothing less than one of the cornerstones that allow us to experience what we can come to know as a single entity. This is, above all, what Claudio Verna offers us through the work of a lifetime.

The eighteen works on paper in the exhibition trace the painter’s investigations and compositional choices, outlining a synthesis of his research.
Beginning with the early felt-tip drawings from 1959, part of the series dedicated to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which still show signs of a certain automatism, the exhibition moves into the works of the 1970s, when his analytical research—focused on the tools and practice of painting—led to national and international recognition: in 1970, Verna participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time.
In his later works, from the 1980s and 1990s, painting becomes an expression of an ever-evolving emotional process, and in the pastels the freedom of gesture lends the mark a particular energy: agitated vibrations emerge in the abbreviation of the gesture. The mark thickens into meshes of warp and weft, composed of line and color—or more precisely, of line within color—which find full expression in a large 2018 work on paper, Discorso sul segno (“Discourse on the Mark”), where a single color, the orange of oil pastel, allows the artist to focus on the materiality of the sign, on the rhythmic alternation of full and empty, drawing from a source of immediate gestures, still charged with wonder, which give the surface variations on the same theme: the very act of painting.