Emilio Vedova - Grand Canal from my studio

The urban landscape was already a popular subject in the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, but predominantly in an idealized manner. Scenes of city life became typical themes with a more realistic interpretation starting in the 19th century. It's worth remembering how, immediately following the realist currents of the 19th century, the Impressionists also placed great emphasis on the everyday, on everyday life, with a certain predilection, however, for the frenetic pace of the city, its crowds, traffic, and typically bourgeois settings. In this painting, Emilio Vedova draws on the tradition of Venetian vedutism through his chosen subject, but completely subverts it by infusing contemporary elements into his gestural execution.

This tempera is highly interesting as a testament to the figurative production of the Informalist Emilio Vedova. The composition is highly instinctive, constructed entirely through color, which definitively transcends drawing in a pronounced synthesis of the represented elements. This execution method could be described as post-Impressionist, as the immediate recording of sensory data is combined with a strong emotional component, arising directly from the artist's sensibility. But the most significant aspect is that this sensibility is expressed in a truly vigorous, almost brutal, pictorial stroke, foreshadowing Vedova's signature gesturality, which informs his Informal works.

Emilio Vedova was a Venetian painter and printmaker (1919–2006). Trained in Expressionism, he initially joined the Corrente group along with Birolli and Guttuso. After participating in the Resistance, in Milan in 1946 he was among the signatories of the manifesto "Beyond Guernica," which established the links between art, politics, and society. His well-known artistic cycles began in the 1950s, initially moving from Neocubism with the "Black Geometries" series to an informal-abstract poetics consisting of automatic gestures on the surface of his canvases.

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