ART CRITICISM AFTER 1951
The principal character of the Eugenio Da Venezia painting is a color sensuality dominated by the artist. Similarly, the lyrical emotion more than once, in it, the side starting almost always naturalistic; in the portrait and in the nude female, in the lagoon landscape or in the flowers compositions Da Venezia - to make sense of the divine light - transformed into a song of color in which the tonal values, instinctively felt that meditated more, are modulations. In its formative experiences he took and take the positive thing of the tradition and the new contemporary explorations . His goal is a visual poetry out of any and all preconceived position purely polemic. How often he reaches the poetry, it is implicit in the immediacy of its success.

Gino Damerini (after the presentation of the exhibition "Paris Prize, 1951)

The name and the art of Eugenio Da Venezia are closely connect to the tradition and to the history of the evolution of the Venice painting of the XX century. Few artists have had the gift of being able and to mix through an instinct and a personalità, towards an expressive independence, a vital instructions of the past and the torments and the glares of today. There is one logical in all of that: Da Venezia, born at the beginning of this century, has walked with its time; an arduous and dramatic travel The “luminous truth” of Da Venezia, does not sacrifice, generally, the shape understanding like volume… the paintings series, that during many years was the fruit of this way, count most adherent and persuasive inspired by skies, waters, landascapes, and agresti views of the Venice lagoon, sunsets. The truth is fixed, here, as a term of comparison among the image of the nature and the image reflected or transposed by the artist; and one and the other is equivalent in the suggestion created by Da Venezia.

Gino Damerini (by the monography, 1956 - text of Gino Damerini)

Eugenio Da Venezia is the painter of the secret tendernesses. Since from the first experiences, nourished of “lagoon” substance, but enriched by the acquired culture in Paris above all on the works of the impressionismi and the post-impressionism, Eugenio Da Venezia reveals one instinct to pick by the truth the aspects with more answers, cancelling and reconstructing the shape until rendering it diaphanous, luminous towards to the light. A faithfull painting coherence to his poetic world, made by one synthesis between truth and contemplation.

Piero Zampetti (by the presentation to the anthological exibition to the Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, 1968)

When I came to Venice in 1927 I was, here, and there was, a Venice school that had many young painters, various and legacies, but linked to the nature of this area. I called them “Lacoons painters”. They were various, but tightened in a happy anxiety and oriented towards a post-impressionism in the possible translation of Veneto Region. Their interest was for all the painting of Veneto, towards the campaign and plateaus. The nineteenth-century tradition continued simple and honest, promoter of the faith of those young people was Pio Semenghini, not still very seen, but recognized, however, for that he was. That faith animated also Da Venezia, although it demonstrated autonomy. Slow in the movements, like in speaking, reasoning how much it has been useful, faithful to its objects as the nature of Veneto, as figures in the study, as the image of his wife, he has acquired gradually one style unit.

Virgilio Guidi (from the published monography in occasion of the anthological exibition, Venice, 1968)

The exibition of Eugenio Da Venezia, that indicate sto us all the activity gives to us a confirmation with how much ardor, with which passion the painter has pursued its poetic ideal. Among falls and returns, of course, but with an always alert and apprehensive sentimentale presence. The discipline with few objects often a breath to moderate the variety of the clear tones, to give a deeper transparency to the atmosphere, that it vanishes far away among the lights of the water and the sky on the limit of the abstraction. Painting, therefore, like joy that gushes out by one state of grace, all opening towards the secrets of the heart and it expresses with a candor of vision, in the passage of the years and of the experiences and it conserves the fresh youth.

Guido Perocco (by the presentation of the anthological exibition, Venice, 1968)

Let's not say abruptly: it is time to rediscover Eugenio Da Venezia. Who has eyes (and aesthetic taste) he has always "rediscovered": a painter like this, in truth, does not need critical aids, so much so does his paintings speak for themselves.
… the painting, we repeat, is painting: all the rest is burnt… and then, as why don’t remain with admiration, with affect, to the beautiful paintings of our artist? The paintings must be seen with the same visual purity with which the author has conceived… Well, the paintings “have spoken to me”: at least some of they, those that i felt more neighbors to my sensibility. Music of the color has “said” to me, tremors of pure aesthetic emotion. Now i repeat, for Da Venezia, what that Cezanne said about Monet: “he is only an eye, but what an eye!”. And I add that few artists of our time have a “similar eye”, as the great Cezanne meant.

Paolo Rizzi (1971)

… it is “the great season” of this painting all luminous vibrations, happy and fresh, kind and fragrante often with candor… “more and more prestigious chromatic orchestra”.

Bruno Morini (1972)

… the works of this artist contain all the feeling and the spiritual wealth of that highest tradition of art and in it generates an alive creativity that reaches its food, its intrinsic essence to that more intimately it has come in the nature …

Vittorio Scorza (1972)

Eugenio Da Venezia in the name ( "omen nomine" we would say with the ancients) its origin and its cultural authorship: he come from the masters of Venetian painting of the early twentieth century, to the large classical tradition of the touch painting of the eighteenth century.
He had the merit and privilege in the thirties, of being the closest in style and sensibility to the latest French Impressionists (made more revolutionary than you think), so as to be sent to France, thus deserving a respectable place in the art of that time.
... .. he chose not many years later, a refuge in the Treviso area, at Collalto. From Collalto period Da Venezia painted fine works (especially his famous and unique "flower") which immediately found enthusiastic admirers.
Even for his living presence in the collections of the Treviso area it was perhaps due this exhibition at Cà Noal to him: which responds primarily to disclose the intent culture through exhibitions of individual artists, the cultural landscape of the Veneto region of our century.

Eugenio Manzato (from the presentation of the exhibition "Cà da Noal" 4-26/04/1981)

... to 1928-30, it was born the so-called second generation of "Capesarini". The best-known names were those of Marco Novati, Juti Ravenna, Neno Mori, Cosimo Privato, Eugenio Da Venezia, Varagnolo Mario, Luigi Scarpa Croce, Aldo Bergamini, Carlo Dalla Zorza, Rino Villa and the youngest of all, Fioravante Seibezzi .... .
In Venice around 1930 and later in the decade since, there were two circles of artists: the first lik to the academy and the other close to the folk tradition ... the other, the so-called "lagoons" were - as has been said - closer to the spirit of the popular City.
It was Fioravante Seibezzi, around 1928-29 to take the issue of lagoon view with extraordinary freshness and sweetness of drafts of color. Typical impressionist painting, his, but with decidedly Venetian characters.
Closer to the new - Impressionists, and then more "French" (Bonnard) was Eugenio Da Venezia, while Neno Mori was on the light strand of Tintoretto and Mario Varagnolo dreamed fantasies turned of Tiziano.
Marco Novati arrive at a popular juicy realism. Another, Carlo Dalla Zorza, matured at the end of the thirties and especially in Burano, in the forties, a painting that filters the memory subtly transfigured landscape.
These painters were hard, in fact, to emerge, because far from the major Italian taste of those years. They also claimed their cultural autonomy, linked to a past that felt like biological heritage, even before culture.

Alpe Adria "The Art between the two wars" in 1984

The freshness of the painting by Eugenio Da Venezia is a continuing wonder. In front of his paintings is natural to ask how a painter can keep the gift of such a vein extraordinary youth in many years of fruitful activities with a rare and precious consistent.
... .. The themes are simple: the portrait, nude, flowers, landscapes, all geared to a happiness and lightness of color soaked with light, yet stayed in the living body in shape and its secret ties.
Eugenio Da Venezia recalls the diligent and patient study chart taken from life with a discipline that is mindful of the old masters to dominate the human figure plastically and to keep hidden informations. This discipline has also served to release the color from the formal structure in its burst lyric as an happy sing.
Eugenio Da Venezia has studied the first lesson of the Impressionists and Pointillists going further with personality.
The landscapes are wonderfully lagoon to this interpretation of so pronounced tendency among opera houses and arts and mirrors of water. The pleasure of the beautiful paintings, expressed with subtle Veneto hedonism, elegant and well pleased at the same time. The brushwork is in light touches that often clogs the whole field of painting, as if to chase with a greed for life and vibrant youth typically an ideal beauty as a spell in seduction always renewed a color that is as connatural breath. < br> Coherence in different kinds of units to its figurative world through the intense brightness of pure color to stamp sharp, alternating with the most gentle and suffused the silver gray, the pale pink and soft lilac, as alternate to fresh flowers dried flowers the colors of spring to autumn in a single painting. What is striking is the emotional exuberance, all anxious and careful artist, a painter of genuine quality.

Guido Perocco (from the presentation of the exhibition at Abano Terme Villa Rathgeb, 1985)

"Large bright breath" (G. Lorenzetti, 1938) "aristocratic sobriety" (E. Zorzi, 1941), "skill that never betrays no complacency" (L. Prey, 1948), "instinctively felt tonal values" (G. Damerini, 1951), are united appreciation of his personality as an artist whose "loyalty to the world is clear and delicate moving" (G. Marchiori, 1968) because it "has continued to work listening to a duty" (V. Guidi , 1968), using the "precious gift to arrive in style via a foolproof color penetration" (S. Marinoi, 1980).
As we see here are all contained ideas that could deck an exhaustive critical. The "duty" first, as Virgilio Guidi called the ethical sense of the pictorial work of Eugenio Da Venezia during these years, that duty took him to a sort of insulation against the current mode, chasing its own poetry, which will become little by little style, seemingly anachronistic.
His work has been in fact voluntarily move some points from which it never is removed while further increasingly links and implications: an operation similar to the work of Morandi. Points are the first design, the scaffolding of the painting, its structure, then the color is understood as essential quality of light, yet the tone especially in the countryside as part of air, but also symbolic in relation to the feel of the painter ... .. landscape, portrait, flowers are the things to which Eugenio Da Venezia in its active maturity has consistently looked to continually renew the freshness of his painting: the critics have widely recognized and the public has confirmed the validity of an artist that consistency has made his think. Consistency, "morality", "duty" at the bottom are just another expression of the will of Eugene Da Venezia to enter and continue a tradition that felt powerfully present and active.
I am not surprised now that he has used for the analysis of the Master, who terms the history of art has often used in the definition of the critical works of the Venetian past line - color, light, tone, color words are trying somehow to retrieve the size verbally color of Da Venezia, a reality that makes painter anachronistic only if you want to deny the significance for us, people of today, history and tradition of which we are children.

Pier Luigi Fantelli (from the presentation of the exhibition at Abano Terme Villa Rathgeb, 1985)

The beautiful exhibition of Eugenio Da Venezia at Castelfranco Veneto is the right thing to who believed with confidence to this Venetian artist of the first order, still happily working at the age of Eighty-eight years.
We had to be here in the House of Giorgione to see once again how vital the position of a poetic painter so richly endowed by nature as Eugenio Da Venezia.
The first exhibition to Cà Pesaro date 1925. Eugenio Da Venezia has always remained consistent with its so lush inspiration through the vicissitudes, sometimes even dramatic, of modern painting, so it is with talent, so open and full of vitality, which had the good fortune to meet and have the valuable friendship of Pierre Bonnard ....
... .. The sap that nourishes the painting of Bonnard and Eugenio Da Venezia is the same: the grain of Venetian painting remained intact until Francesco Guardi in the eighteenth century. In the two artists have different aspects, education and a different environment, but certain qualities typically happy and open are the same: the painting is happy and cheerful.
It 'a good omen that we can say that truth right here in the house of Giorgione at Castelfranco, between the testimonies that it holds, pending a major exhibition of Eugenio Da Venezia in the City where he was born in Venice, which has fed the joy of this painting.

Guido Perocco (from the presentation of the exhibition "From Venice Eugenio Retrospective anthological 1923 1988" House of Giorgione, 1988)

… Eugenio Da Venezia, in fact, has crossed nearly for entire, by now all our century, with one extraordinary coherence and linearity; he is advanced imperturbable through the fights, the revolutions, the contradictions of the greater artistic and cultural revolutions that have upset the years Twenty and still more the terrible years thirty, made of social and formal fights, the outbreaks of the wars and the entire post-war period, with all the volcano eruptions of the new searches of the Art and of the Anti Art, of the structures of style every day proposed and thrown to the air, of the metamorphoses of the Shape and the violent destructions of Anti-Shape. Without yieldings to the renews manifest of the mode and of the sirens of the easy and ephemeral glories, he is advanced with calm in the decades pulling straight for his road, but always closely legacy ..... to his Venice, from which always he had to draw the alimony of his color and his thought.

Dino Formaggio (1990)

… the artistic event of Eugenio Da Venezia allows us to observe one fecund hypothesis of connection among genius loci and French post-impressionism painting (known directly to the Biennale), to the standard of the same principle of sovereignty of the pure color which vehicle of the light. It turns out a compatible combination with the intentions assigned, however to the art, in the tradition of the “kinds” (portrait, landscape, still life etc) and in the figurative destiny of the painting. The post lagoon impressionism of Eugenio Da Venezia makes treasure of the crushing of the mimesi plastic of the first impressionism, operated by the incessant intense activity of the light, than of the next recomposed phase. About this it goes remembered how much said Bonnard to Da Venezia, to the Biennale of 1934, admiring the Eugenio da Venezia works: “… the advice that I allow to give to you is to deep the study of the shape, for being able to master it and to the times also apparently to destroy it”.

Virginia Baradel (1990)

… if the necessity of air, light, of pure, free, colors join Eugenio Da Venezia with painters as Seibezzi… his link with the French painting is the main difference in his artistic study: at the beginnig draft, generic affinities with this or that painter of Biennale, in years Thirty, of one directed acquaintance of Bonnard; he interests to the Biennale of 1934 to Eugenio Da Venezia pictures. The chromatic vibration, typical of the “line Veneto”, are therefore in Eugenio Da Venezia prevailing, but, like in the French master, never separated by the resource to the design and the formal system.

Giuseppina Dal Canton (1994)

"Sunflowers", 1988, Oil on canvas Cm 77x58: A enriched by broad brushstroke bright colors and filled with light and substantiates the Sunflowers are the colors of a truth revealed by the evocatively dream, deeply lyrical and clear, the background, perhaps less effective in veiled tones and pale color, maintains an impalpable atmosphere vivid and vibrant accents of serene life.
"Portrait of the Painter Casonato", Oil on canvas Cm 62x55: a vibrant color, full of charming poetry and a general tone suffused enliven the work, whose background is characterized by swift brushstrokes touch and soft sparsely gradually toward the first floor . Here, more incisive and less dense, grow and approach to emphasize the subject through the clear light and delicate notation of which are charged, sometimes far away to leave a glimpse of the bare canvas.

P.B. Palazzo Sarcinelli 1988 to 1998. A donation for a new museum. Marco Goldin (1998)

… "Paesaggio laghetto Papadopoli" 1932, "Paesaggio" 1933, go to join to the catalogue of Eugenio Da Venezia, the “French” of the Venice painters, for its frequent trips to Paris and the straits contacts with Pierre Bonnard. “Landscape Papadopoli small lake” makes part of the series of works dedicated to the garden and its small lake, that Da Venezia translates in a rich chromatic drawing up that recalls the touch. About Papadopoli Garden we have various reviews, realized from 1931 and exposed also to the collective of the Bevilacqua La Masa, among which “Paesaggio laghetto Papadopoli” of the Diocesano Museum of Trento and “Ninfee” of the S.A.D.E. The version of Rovereto has been exposed in 1932 to the Interprovinciale exibition of the Veneto of the Bevilacqua La Masa, as it turns out from the notice and it was introduced in 1968 at the anthological exibition in Venice by the same institution.

Paola Pizzamano (2001)


The Form Mastery. A tribute to Eugenio Da Venezia painter

Twenty years ago, exactly on September 8, 1992, Eugenio Da Venezia died at his home in San Marco (1900-1992). A life between two wars: the departments I was in far from the front, from the II civil. In these scenarios, the Master countered by a painting that unfolds in peace and harmony with a close connection to the venetian tradition. Everything is born from French Impressionism and the first generation of so-called School of Burano (Pio Semeghini, Umberto Moggioli and Gino Rossi). Two poles in which the pictorial interpretation of Da Venezia evolves. The nineteenth Venice Biennale of 1934 marks the encounter with Pierre Bonnard that learns to him the key concept of pictorial poetics, ie once regarded as established and internalized a certain mastery of form, he must immediately destroy it with the great quality of colorist demonstrated. In summary an inner disposition to French post-impressionism joined the board of Bonnard within the context of the School of Burano, leading Eugenio Da Venezia to paint outdoors with shades on and never noisy. A painting "lean" on the canvas, out of touch just mentioned but at the same time strong but not hesitant. An innate gift that allows him to participate to nine editions of the Venice Biennale from 1932 to '56, plus an out cadenza for the XL anniversary of the Venetian historic institution. Meanwhile, globally, the avant-garde advance and the Art from Modern switch to Contemporary. A new artistic context, not internalized by Da Venezia, much to criticize with access tones defending and continuing until his death the beloved figurative path. Probably a limit which instead passed such Giuseppe Santomaso, his friend in the early years. The critical time is very focused in exalting the artistic period of the artist between before and after World War II, but it’s important don’t forget the last twenty, thirty years of his work in which he has produced very interesting works with a touch more marked and life tends to recall expressionist, though in a balance of form and color that has always distinguished it.

Alain Chivilò (2012)

© 2008 Eugeniodavenezia.eu