When the 18th Contemporary Art Day, the Embassy of Italy in Vietnam is paying tribute to Giacinto Cerone with an exhibition of 21 unpublished drawings by this major artist. The works are from the private collection of Virgilio Leggiero and the exhibition was curated by Massimo Scaringella in collaboration with the Giacinto Cerone Archive.
The event is taking place at Casa Italia, a prestigious space in the Vietnamese capital dedicated to Italian culture. It will be opened on Saturday 8 October by the Ambassador of Italy, Antonio Alessandro, and will remain open to the public until Friday 14th.
Eighteen years after his death, Giacinto Cerone still holds a prominent position in 20th century Italian art. He interpreted its visions and trends, but was also closely connected to contemporary issues, for example in his focus on nature and sustainability.
A dynamic and volatile artist, always poised between order and disorder, he produced some of Italy’s most significant and innovative ceramic sculptures. That same emotional tension and expressive physicality emerge just as strongly in the drawings on paper now being presented for the first time, in Vietnam.
Freed from the weight of his materials, Cerone’s art is transformed into nervy, vibrant marks. Things cease to be what they are and become what we want them to be. Here then is the profile of a woman shown through filigree, the serenity of a landscape through a vortex of marks, the face of his child in its simplicity, and much more that we see in the drawings presented in this exhibition.
Although Cerone is not known to have travelled to Vietnam, we do know of his deep admiration for this country and its history, which gave rise to an exhibition entitled “On the paths of Ho Chi Minh”, hosted in Bologna in January 2006. With great pleasure, therefore, we have brought the artist’s works to Vietnam for the first time, with an exhibition that is in effect a world première presenting unpublished drawings. The works were kindly made available by the art collector Virgilio Leggiero, a doctor and personal friend of Cerone’s who treated him in the last years of his life.
Contemporary Art Day, of which the exhibition is part, is promoted in Italy and throughout the world by the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums (AMACI). The initiative was set up with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity at the Italian Ministry of Culture, with the collaboration of the Directorate General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
For more information, please contact culturale.hanoi@esteri.it.
