Metaphysics: Perceptions of the Self

📅 Saturday, April 13, 2019

A solo exhibition by Vincenzo Bartoli, an initiative promoted by American gallerist Ines Doway, director of DWY New York.

Opening at 5:30 PM

Musical accompaniment by composer Roberto Rea

Exhibition open until April 20

Sunday, April 14: 10:00 AM – 8:00 PM

Monday through Saturday: 10:00 AM – 9:00 PM

Free admission

The 40 large-format oil paintings presented at the exhibition are the result of two years of intense work by the artist and are being shown to the public for the first time at Palazzo Velli.

Critic Giorgio Vulcano will guide us through the artist's creative journey—a unique, unrepeatable project and the culmination of a process that blends emotional experiences with immersions into the realm of dreamlike sensations. Through the medium of art, the exhibition seeks to reveal the mysterious meaning of things in their metaphysical essence.

It stands as a manifesto on the value of metaphysics—contrasted with the apparent futility of material things—and an assertion of its power, re-evaluated through Bartoli’s original talent for representational mimesis. Art historian Professor Giovanni Solfini writes:

“…Bartoli is a true surrealist who views Sigmund Freud’s philosophy as both his source of inspiration and his very ontological and aesthetic foundation. Interested in Freud’s theories regarding the workings of the mind, he maintains that art can act as a bridge—an opening and closing—between the unconscious and the conscious.

Thus, his art is conceived as a form of writing—a shorthand of the unconscious—where the work’s beauty lies in its visionary power, its evocative capacity, and the disorienting effect it elicits. It is an art capable of transfiguring images and fantastical impressions, symbolically revealing the darker, spectral side of the human psyche—what he terms ‘eternal signs.’ His works emerge from a combination of moments of insight, moods, and intuitions born of a meditative-contemplative state of consciousness, acting as a symbolic unveiling of the unconscious. The meditative process intensifies visionary faculties, activating the ability to create ‘condensed’ images capable of representing multiple hidden meanings. His artistic vision is defined by a poetics of metaphor—evocative and deeply compelling. The themes consist primarily of visionary depictions of nocturnal landscapes and mysterious interiors, where elements of reality combine in impossible ways against indefinite perspectives. Here, appearances—laden with unconscious content and profound emotional significance—predominate, all enveloped in an unsettling light that evokes an unreal sense of hallucinatory solitude…”