Renato Borsato

Renato Borsato (born December 14, 1927 in Venice , † July 4, 2013 there ) was an Italian painter. He lived and worked in Venice.

Life

Renato Borsato comes from an old family on the Venetian mainland, an origin that he does not attribute to his career. Despite many trips and international recognition, the lagoon city of Venice has always been and remained his home - not only in an artistic sense. A family relationship with the Venetian vedute painter, stage designer and decorative painter Giuseppe Borsato has not yet been proven.

Renato Borsato's artistic career began around 1950 without having had regular training at an academy or a master. In 1953 he worked in Paris for a few months and was able to use one of the studios of the municipal Ca 'Pesaro on the Grand Canal in Venice as a winner of the Premio Burano . That year he also had his first solo exhibition in the Venetian non-commercial Galleria Bevilacqua La Masa.

As early as 1954, Borsato was invited to take part in the 27th Venice Biennale for the first time and won the Premio Tursi , which was also awarded to him in the following edition of the international art exhibition that takes place every two years in Venice.

In 1955 he went back to Paris, this time on a grant from the French government, without knowing the French language. After all, he said, he wanted to go to France to paint, not to speak.

In the 50s and 60s he took part in a large number of national and international exhibitions, including his three-time participation in the Quadriennale Nazionale d'Arte in Rome, VII. 1956, VIII. 1960 and IX. Quadriennale 1965/66 in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni , and won many art prizes.

Of his numerous trips in those years, the one to Sicily in 1964, which took him to the island of Pantelleria , was of particular importance for his later artistic production.

In 1960 he designed the stage decorations for the operas Turandot in the Venetian Teatro La Fenice , in 1961 for La traviata and in 1962 for Madama Butterfly there .

In the 1970s he resided for part of the year in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. From 1979 to 1986 he was President of the Venetian Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa , founded in 1898 , which is dedicated to promoting young artists. In the second half of the 50s and 60s he was a member of the jury for their annual exhibitions.

Picturesque work

His artistic position is arranged between a highly personal Post-Impressionism and painterly abstraction , without ever having taken the step to completely abandon an image subject. In contrast to his younger colleague Emilio Vedova , this put him in a certain contradiction to the mainstream of non-figurative painting that dominates the Western European art scene and limited his success on the international art market . Nevertheless, his immense painterly production of several thousand paintings - plus a few prints and a few drawings - always found sales directly from the studio .

Most of the time Borsato painted “alla prima” directly on the canvas without a preliminary drawing. The main themes of his painting are landscapes, nature in the broader sense, and women, often in Venetian cityscapes and views of Venice.

The older artist colleague Virgilio Guidi described him as early as 1953 as a “naturalist who of course does not reject nature, but just as naturally does not forget himself about nature.” “His nature, the nature he depicts, is”, according to Guidi, “ never artificial in the scholastic sense, appearing in a mannerist way, but lively, tangible, from a sensation that is already a form of consciousness in itself. "

Even if nature has been the most important subject of his painting since the beginning of his artistic activity, Borsato concentrated increasingly on painting views of his secret garden in the Venetian artists' quarter of San Vio, where he had his studio and from around the mid-1970s worked regularly until his death. The flowers and plants in his garden are not depicted in an impressionistic or realistic manner, they are increasingly becoming the starting point for a free, purely painterly elaboration, which is often based on older pictorial inventions, with which Borsato's pictures increasingly take on the character of imaginary landscapes of memory.

Renato Borsato was the last representative of a generation of artists who dedicated themselves to the tradition of the Venetian colorismo , the Venetian color painting.

Prices (selection)

• 1953 2nd Prize Premio Nazionale di Burano
• 1954 Premio Tursi at the 27th Biennale d'Arte di Venezia
• 1955 Premio Nazionale S. Fedele, Milan
• 1956 Premio Tursi at the 28th Biennale d'Arte di Venezia
• 1958 Premio Rotary Club at the 29th Biennale d'Arte di Venezia
• 1962 Premio Soppelsa at the 31st Biennale d'Arte di Venezia

Works in public collections

• Cortina d'Ampezzo, Museo d'Arte Moderna Casa delle Regole d'Ampezzo: "un giorno di pioggia per Betsabea", 1964
• Milan, Museo Civico d'Arte Moderna
• Pordenone, Museo di Pordenone, Palazzo Richieri: "Natale a Milano", 1962
• Rome, Galleria d'Arte Moderna
• Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Treviso, Museo Comunale: “Le ragazze di Saccafisola”, 1964
• Trieste, Hotel Savoy: wall painting, 1958
• Venice, Museo di Ca 'Pesaro : “Paesaggio bretone”, 1953; “Mattino mediterraneo”, 1961/62; “Diario veronese”, 1963/64; "Maggio 1973 ... è fiorito il glicine", 1973 (as of 2013: 18 works)

literature

• 7 pittori d'oggi: Barbaro, Borsato, Dario Paolucci, Gambino, Gianquinto, Licata, Magnolato. Catalog: Ala Napoleonica, Piazza S. Marco, Venezia, 1960.
• Catalogo Bolaffi d'arte moderna. Torino 1964-1972.
• protagonisti dell'immagine: Renato Borsato. around 1980.
• Borsato. Pagine di diario. Catalog: Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia 1987.
• General artist lexicon. Sour. Vol. 13, 1996, p. 123.
• Stringa, Nico (ed.): La pittura nel Veneto. Il Novecento: dizionario degli artisti. Milano [Electa] 2009, pp. 66/67.
• Lutto nell'arte. Il ricordo del sindaco. Morto Renato Borsato. L'azalea, l'ultimo tocco della vita del pittore. In: Corriere del Veneto . Venezia Mestre, July 6, 2013, p. 15.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archivio Biblioteca Quadrennial (ArBiQ): Borsato, Renato . Italian, accessed September 27, 2013.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} General artist lexicon. Sour. Vol. 13, 1996, p. 123.