It is the monumental site-specific triptych of Natale Addamiano entitled To see the stars again... the undisputed protagonist of the solo exhibition presented at Dep Art Gallery in Milan from 8 June to 25 September 2021.
With it, the review curated by Federico Sardella proposes a series of recent works, which are part of the cycle ‘Starry Skies’, placing the emphasis on a painting that is mostly related to darkness and night, but that is equally rich in glows and bright traces.
The space of painting in all the works on display, from the large triptych designed specifically for the spaces of the gallery, to the smaller works up to the smallest papers, although forced within the limits of the support, tends to expand beyond its boundaries. A space that responds to the need of the artist to relate to nature, always understood as an inexhaustible source of inspiration and pretext to paint, made deep by the many stesures, the countless pictorial traces, that make it up and allow the user to be kidnapped and get lost in it.
Natale Addamiano’s works, intimate and contemplative, lead towards a path of light and possibility after darkness, until they allow to ‘see the stars again...’ with an explicit reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which in the last verse of Hell with Virgil finds himself contemplating the starry sky again. The title of the exhibition highlights this need for absolute and infinity that animates the artist and leads him to measure himself, day after day, with his inexhaustible desire to paint, to interrogate painting and find in it always new stimuli, spaces and possibilities.
Natale Addamiano began to give life to the nucleus of paintings ‘Starry Skies’ in 2010, a strand that continues with such vitality as to confirm the coherence of a path in which painting is always the protagonist and its practice has never failed. Not by chance, the works presented as part of the exhibition at the Dep Art Gallery, although apparently united by a predominant shade attributable to the range of blacks, suggest instead the participation of other colors that animate and liven the painted surfaces. Their intensity is felt in these skies, between the stars and the nebulae: they manifest themselves as if they were presences, poised between the materiality of painting and memory, between the intimacy of colour and the possibility of attracting and absorbing, which color itself predicts.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (Italian and English) published by Dep Art Gallery, with images of the exhibition, reproductions of all artworks on display, a conversation between Natale Addamiano and Federico Sardella and updated bio-bibliographic notes.
Natale Addamiano was born in Bitetto (Bari), 12th of May 1943. Lives and works in Milan.
Opening in Milan in 2006 with Mario Nigro’s solo exhibition Opere di Mario Nigro, Dep Art Gallery presents compelling artworks by modern and contemporary Italian and international artists. The gallery moved into its current location in Via Comelico, a former school with substantial exhibition spaces, in 2015. Dedicated to presenting contemporary Italian art, Dep Art Gallery has also been the Turi Simeti archive centre—archiving the artist’s legacy and producing a catalogue raisonne of artworks on canvas—since 2013.

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