Smali, Venetian painting
Curated by Luigi Bortoluzzi
When in Venice, seated on the most welcoming boat, you cross the Giudecca canal against the cold wind blowing from that island of ordinary people and strange artists, when you head for Saint Mark’s, were four horses brave the rain with a smile that has a taste of the Orient, when sunset falls and the city is reflected in the dark sea, this is when you enter the paintings of Smali. Oh stranger! Can you feel the warmth of gold, the shivers, the cries, the sobs, the screams of the façades, this sound of waves? But beware! turn not your eyes towards the west: there lies the black ice of the chemical plant, the ponderous soviet-like shadow looms close by. You had rather look there, where that faithful dog sits by his little mistress, marvellous in the last radiant rays of daylight. Smali has kept her there, he does not let her run off, he gives her to you as he gives you the city: inebriated by these paintings, whether you are a man or a woman, from Europe or from far away, the night will no longer plague your soul, it will no longer annihilate your reason, you will no longer have to combat your pain with beer and wine, you will see: beer and wine are no weapons in Venice. The good frame-makers who hate those rich young men who pretend to be poor, the art printers who still spend their nights playing with ghosts of ink hailing from the past, the waitress who glides from table to table in a miniskirt and black stockings, slender as the Concorde was: they all love the Venetian paintings of Samli, his full and at the same time delicate colours, the surfaces smooth as a perfect face or worn as the back of an adult hand, that depth that never ceases to enchant you, always capturing you: watch out! Capturing you like a magic potion, thus in actual fact it frees your spirit and immediately you know, you understand, you feel that this is life. Many canals are empty between the calli, they have been drained of their water because there is work to be done, now, now not tomorrow, the light is sweet and the warm smell of rejected greens rises: Venice comes from the canals knowing also how to empty your heart when love has flown far away, and you have nothing but the memories of that love, and hanging flowers will dry, and pumpkins on tables and egg shells, frozen in pose, there, like that, human and animal-like, dear to you and to the gods, to Diana, to Daphne, to Europe, to Smali who knows what is of value and what is not, what is urgent, what is poetry, and you look again and again at that orange fruit already hanging in your house. You have seen Venice then, the city where women move their bodies as if they were always being caught on film, where they freely wag their chins, where Smali paints, after Bellini and Titian.

Luigi Bortoluzzi, after his studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, has written on advertising, politics, economics and photography.