Antonio Scaccabarozzi – Diafanés. The exhibition at the Fortuny Museum in Venice
- Redazione
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia presents, in the spaces of the Fortuny Museum, the exhibition Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, a project curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina, in collaboration with Galleria Clivio and the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive.
The exhibition presents an intervention dedicated to one of the most rigorous and singular strands of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the work of Antonio Scaccabarozzi (1936–2008) in dialogue with the figure and legacy of Mariano Fortuny. The comparison — guided by structural affinities rather than formal analogies — explores a shared conception of the artwork as a space of passage and experience.
Best known for his pictorial research of the 1970s, in which arithmetic calculation is combined with chromatic and dimensional variables, Scaccabarozzi developed an unprecedented visual language expressed through translucent and transparent membranes — sheets of acetate or polyethylene — capable of generating spaces for exploration. These works investigate the relationships between architecture, observer, and artistic practice, exerting a lasting influence on generations of contemporary artists.
A visionary inventor of techniques that reshaped the relationship between landscape and body, between antiquity and modernity, Mariano Fortuny is recognized for designing extraordinary forms — such as pleating — that radically transformed the very idea of clothing. Both artists can be regarded as refined and attentive weavers of diaphanous works, entrusted to the viewer’s gaze and experience with the implicit invitation to be examined and traversed — to be seen through their layered structures in a contemplation charged with poetry.
The title Diafanés refers to the quality of bodies that allow themselves to be traversed by light, offering a cross-cutting interpretive key to the project. The exhibition unfolds through approximately twenty works, including two interventions in direct dialogue with the museum’s permanent collections. The presentation is complemented by a section dedicated to the relationship between Scaccabarozzi’s research and contemporary design, featuring a creation by designer Maria Calderara, as well as an inclusive project for partially sighted and blind visitors, developed by the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive in collaboration with the Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano. Mediation activities and an interdisciplinary public program accompany the project.
The exhibition assumes an unprecedented role within the Venetian context due to the artist’s historical connection with the city: Scaccabarozzi was represented by Galleria del Cavallino, in dialogue with the intellectual milieu of the postwar period. Today, he is the focus — for the first time — of an exhibition capable of restoring, in Mediation activities and an interdisciplinary public program accompany the projectan organic way, the relationship between his work and Venice. The city’s aquatic and atmospheric qualities find a deep resonance in his works, characterized by diaphanous, light, and shifting stratifications that explore degrees of visibility, perception, and the relationship between individual, environment, and temporality.
LIFE AND WORK
A leading figure in analytical and conceptual painting, Antonio Scaccabarozzi developed over more than forty years a coherent and radical language aimed at examining the foundations of the visual through a phenomenological and mathematical investigation of color within the space of the pictorial event. Following his neo-concrete and programmed-art experiences of the 1960s and the analytical research of the 1970s, the artist reached a mature expressive phase in a practice that is at once conceptual and lyrical, where painting emerges as a continuous negotiation between measure and freedom, design and contingency, calculation and emotion.
Beginning in the 1980s, the series Quantità libere, Polietileni, Banchise, and Ekleipsis marked a decisive turning point in his research. The adoption of polyethylene sheet as a primary medium transformed the pictorial surface into a diaphanous, versatile, and ethereal membrane: no longer a simple support, but an operational field in which painting redefines itself as event, process, and spatial relation. Cut, folded, layered, shaped, or left slack, polyethylene becomes an autonomous work, addressing at a new level the problem of vision and its limits, the recto and verso of painting, and its environmental extension.
As the artist himself stated: “The idea is to place the work in the boundary zone of opposing forces, where the tension established between the configuration of the object and the gaze that moves beyond it charges this idea with vitality.” Within this framework, the exhibited works — suspended or laid out in space — establish an active relationship with the architecture of Palazzo Fortuny and with the visitor’s body, inviting an experience of seeing constructed through passage, displacement, and duration.
With Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, the Fortuny Museum reaffirms its role as a site of research and experimentation, offering the public an immersive journey in which historical memory and contemporaneity enter into dialogue, prompting reflection on the limits and possibilities of visual perception.
ANTONIO SCACCABAROZZI. DIAFANÉS
Museo Fortuny, Venice
January 28 – April 6, 2026
Curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina
In collaboration with Clivio Gallery and Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive