Riccardo Licata - Travel Memories

Born in Turin on December 20, 1929. After a brief stay in Paris, his family moved to Rome, where they lived from 1935 to 1945. In 1946, Licata moved with his mother to Venice. In 1947, after seeing some of his drawings, Giuseppe Mazzariol convinced him to enroll in the Art School, where he studied with Luciano Gasperi and Mario De Luigi. The architect Antonio Salvatori introduced him to the artistic culture of the Bauhaus, while the painter Romualdo Scarpa introduced him to the art of mosaic in an experience that would prove decisive for his future. In 1948 he repeatedly visited the Venice International Biennale, the first after the Liberation, where he "discovered" Peggy Guggenheim's collection (in particular the works of Jackson Pollock) and met the artists of the New Arts Front (Santomaso, Birolli, Pizzinato, Vedova, Guttuso, Turcato, Viani etc.), instigators of the debate on the renewal of Italian art in the post-war period. He regularly attended concerts at the Teatro La Fenice and the Contemporary Music Festival of the Venice Biennale. With painters Ennio Finzi, Tancredi, Bruno Blenner, and sculptor Giorgio Zennaro, he formed a group of young artists with an abstract leaning in 1949. His "graphic-pictorial writing" inspired by music begins to take shape. In 1950 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice where he attended Bruno Saetti's painting courses and participated in the Group Exhibition of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, where, the following year, he held his first solo exhibition. The most important Venetian art critics of the time - Giuseppe Mazzariol, Giuseppe Marchiori, Umbro Apollonio, Silvio Branzi, Berto Morucchio and Toni Toniato - began to take an interest in his work. He exhibited at the 1952 Venice Biennale with a large mosaic. In 1953, he participated in the Milan Triennale and won First Prize for engraving at the Youth Biennale in Gorizia. The following year, 1954, he exhibited again at the Venice Biennale. He met Gino Severini. In 1955, he participated in the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil and won First Prize for painting at the Youth Biennial in Gorizia. In 1956 he was invited to the Rome Quadrennial, exhibited with a personal exhibition of engravings at the Venice Biennale and won the First Prize of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation. The following year he obtained a scholarship and moved to Paris to assist Gino Severini in the chair of mosaic. Since 1957 he has lived in Paris (with frequent and regular work trips also to Venice where he has always maintained a studio) and began to regularly frequent the ateliers of Stanley Hayter, Johnny Friedlaender and Henri Goetz, as well as artists and critics such as Matta, Brauner, Huntertwasser, Lebel, Jouffroy and the Italians Tancredi and Mondino. In 1961 he married Maria Battistella, a singer who researched ancient folk and Renaissance ballads, with whom he had his son Giovanni in 1962. In 1962 the Mosaic School was integrated into the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, where Licata still teaches, and since 1970 he has taught experimental engraving techniques at the International School of Graphics in Venice. In 1963 he received the Michetti Prize and in 1975, First Prize at the Forlì Graphic Arts Exhibition. Licata subsequently participated in the Venice Biennale of 1964, 1970, and 1972, the Rome Quadrennial, the Biennials of Paris, Alexandria, and São Paulo, as well as the most important international graphic art biennials (Ljubljana, Tokyo, Mulhouse, Krakow, Reykjavik, Berlin, etc.). His solo exhibitions have been held in major Italian cities and in Paris, Helsinki, São Paulo, London, Dublin, Malmö, Mulhouse, Lille, Poitiers, Auxerre, Rouen, Barcelona, ​​Brussels, Nice, Amsterdam, Grenoble, Taipei, Ghent, Stockholm, and Munich, among others. Of particular significance was the large travelling exhibition in Spain in 1990, curated by Enzo Di Martino, sponsored by the Caja de Ahorros de Asturias, and displayed in a dozen cities such as Oviedo, Gijon, Leon, Valencia, Valladolid, Malaga, Granada, etc. He has created large mosaics in public spaces in Italian and French cities such as Genoa (Palazzo dei Lavori Pubblici), Bourgoin Jailleu, Sault les Rethel, Lille (University), Perpignan, Monza, Dozza (fresco), Reggio Emilia (Chamber of Labor), etc. In the theatre field he designed the sets and costumes for Euripides' "Medea" (1978 - Treviso, Teatro Comunale) and for the ballet "Ichspaltung" by Giuseppe Marotta (1980 - Venice, Teatro Goldoni). His works are found in the Museums of Modern Art of Venice, Milan, Mulhouse, Alessandria, Rome, Turin, Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Vienna, New York, Stockholm, Florence, Stuttgart, etc. Monographic works on his work have been published: 1982 - Il Traghetto Venezia Gallery Editions edited by Enzo Di Martino and Toni Toniato 1985 - Fabbri Editori Milan edited by Enzo Di Martino and Aldo Spinardi A comprehensive documentation of Riccardo Licata's activity is preserved in the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale. He died in Venice on February 19, 2014.