BRUSSELS.- The exhibition 'Dante the European' by Corrado Veneziano is inspired by a poetic and spiritual Dante, but at the same time lucid and determined in proposing a supranational institutional instance, close to our most advanced concept of Europe. The artist's new pictorial project, entirely focused on the suggestions and the territory 'in which Europe was made', was inaugurated on Friday 21 October at the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels.

'Dante the European' finds its symmetrical breadth in the distribution of the institutional venues that simultaneously host the forty-one works. Involved in this widespread and ramified exhibition are the Cultural Institute of the Italian Embassy, the CNR, the National Research Council, Unioncamere Europa, the Belgo-Italian Chamber of Commerce, the exhibition halls of the Regional Representations of Lazio and Piedmont and the Piola Bookshop.

Each of these spaces is now hosting through December 6, one or more works by 'Dante the European' with its own opening hours and days open to the public: an enlarged and transversal exhibition that will be enriched, over the 45 days of the programme, by talks by scholars, professors and scientists, readings by actors and musical performances by instrumentalists and singers. Always in the sign of a Europe strongly rooted - also - in Dante's and Italian thought.

There are forty-one works on display, almost all very recent and never before exhibited to the public. Some are dedicated to the Shoah, the darkest Hell realised by mankind on Earth; others mimic mouse darts, lost on celestial and technological backdrops. In other works, we see painted the verses of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the author of an unfinished and dense 'La Divina Mimesis', and the phrases of Antonio Gramsci, who defined Dante as the 'turner' of a fully 'identity' Italian language. And, then, Auerbach, Valéry, Garcìa Màrquez, Kerouac.

The exhibition also includes a number of canvases from the 'ISBN Dante and other visions' project, sponsored and supported by the Ministry of Culture and exhibited in the Los Angeles City Hall, the Foreign Ministry in Algiers, the Ossolinski National Museum in Wroclaw, the Bucharest Opera House and the National Museum in Lanzhou, among others.




These canvases include 'L'Inferno evoking Buffalmacco', which will become the Italian State stamp dedicated to Inferno in September 2021, with the support of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of the Economy, the Italian Post Office and the Istituto Poligrafico.

In order to measure himself, pictorially, with Dante and Europe, with poetry and politics, Corrado Veneziano reuses his well-established frequentation of algorithmic and symbolic codes, commercial logos and alphabets of ancient and contemporary languages. He deepens his relationship with the figurative and ventures into more material tensions, assembling wood, iron and crystal. In the latter, Veneziano camouflages, among the founding words of the European Union and the signs of the Ptolemaic zodiac (on which Dante's path of the Divine Comedy is based), the twelve stars that make up the European flag. And these, different from each other, are zircons, jades, amethysts, rubies, emeralds.

The exhibition 'Dante the European’ ' is coordinated by the Association D.d’Arte, chaired by art critic Francesca Barbi Marinetti. Institutional relations are managed by Cinzia De Marzo, European Climate Pact Ambassador.

Corrado Veneziano

Graduated in Literature, with a specialisation in Philosophy and a PhD in Art, Corrado Veneziano initially measured himself with theatre and television activities: he studied at the Piccolo Teatro school in Milan and worked as a Director for the Venice Biennale, Rai3 Melevisione and Rainews 24.

He exhibited his paintings for the first time in 2013, under the encouragement of Achille Bonito Oliva and Marc Augé. In 2014, he presented his work, curated by Derrick de Kerckhove and at the invitation of the Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute, in Brussels. In 2015, RAI commissioned him to design the logo for the 67th Prix Italia and he exhibited in Paris, in the Espace en Cours, directed by Julie Heintz. In 2016, he was in St Petersburg’s Nevsky 8 Municipal Gallery. In 2017, he was officially invited by the Chinese government to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Lanzhou with an exhibition curated by Wu Weidung.

In 2019, he realised the exhibition ‘Atlantic Leonardo’, selected in the official French programme for the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. The exhibition was presented in Amboise under the patronage of the President of the French Republic and the Louvre Museum.