Smeraldo. Antracite. Cobalto.

Rinaldo Invernizzi’s cycle of paintings ‘Smeraldo. Antracite. Cobalto.’ (Emerald. Anthracite. Cobalt.), which has been shown in the splendid setting of Palazzo Martinengo, parallel to the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia in 2022, is an ode to the artist’s beloved city on the lagoon. By extracting the luminous quality of the emerald-green of the lagoon, the anthracite-grey of the night and the cobalt-blue of the clouds, the artist focuses on the subjective nature of these three distinct colours. He approaches the chromatic matter as a complex, autonomous entity which he returns to us in a new emotional form. The resulting compositions are obtained by ‘dragging’ the colour, in an approach to painting driven by the rotation of the gesture, producing clotting and thickness, and then ‘racing’ with lines and trails.
As an expression of the alternating play between the clouds and the water, from the first light of day to the dramatic reddening of the evening sky, emphasising a unique feature of the lagoon – the leaden lustre of its storms – in tones which have more the persistence of gemstones than the elusive shimmer of the sea, these paintings appear as images that seek in some sense to orchestrate the indecipherable hierarchy between the sky and the sea.