Luigi Gardenal

Luigi Gardenal was born in Mestre in 1950, the city where he still resides. In the forty years of his career he focused on multiple activities including painting, engraving, graphics and urban design. He also designed environmental installations and multimedia performances and created artistic events related to different disciplines with different languages. In each work, the protagonist are colours that the artist cleverly adapts to collages, engravings on canvas and PVC, bandages, metal plates and papers with exotic origins. Color is used as a means to cross history and make a journey through the sedimentations of human civilization.

Among the various subjects, that of travel accompanies many of his works. Often are journeys close to those made by the artist, where he investigates and represents visions of monumental architecture, improbable spaces, the lagoon and Porto Marghera. Other times the places narrated are impervious landscapes such as the Khyber Pass, the mountain pass that connects Pakistan with Afghanistan, crossed several times by the artist, as an archaeological designer and a researcher of traces and shapes. This mythical place, part of the ancient Silk Road and a point of significant strategic-military importance, has now become the protagonist of a war crossroads. Gardenal brings on canvas his inner tensions towards an Eastern world marked by conflicts.

The artist’s work is also affirmed in the public context with the mobile installation Il Quaderno di Zaher in the Bosco di Mestre. The work is dedicated to Zaher Rezai, a boy who fled the war in Afghanistan and, once he arrived in Italy, died in Orlanda street in Mestre. The installation-sculpture collects the words and images of the diary found in his backpack.

Testimony of public art is the realization of Piazza Candiani, in collaboration with the architecture studio Workshop. Majestic work made with the pixel-mosaic technique using Venetian glass enamels and marbles from all over the world.

Luigi Gardenal started his artistic career at a very young age, learning the tools of the trade from Virgilio Guidi and Giuseppe Marchiori. His training took place in close contact with the masters of modern Venetian painting, from Guidi to Vedova, from Deluigi to Santomaso.

He has been dedicated important solo exhibitions and he has participated in several collective works in Italy and abroad, including the exhibitions in Milan (Galleria San Fedele, Galleria Gian Ferrari), New York (Museum of Modern Art, The Artist and The Book in Twentieth Century Italy and Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice, Stockholm (Italienske Kulturinstitutet), Paris (Maison des Beaux Arts), Vienna (Albertina Museum), St. Petersburg (Ermitage), Montpellier (Galerie d’Art Contemporain), Florence (Palazzo Strozzi), Venice (Ca ‘Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art).

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