ABC-ARTE is pleased to announce its upcoming group exhibition, a project that brings together four artists: Tomas Rajlich, Jerry Zeniuk, Marco Tirelli, and Salvatore Cuschera. Through painting and sculpture, they explore the value of making art, understood as a physical act, technical expertise, and, at the same time, conceptual research.
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, painter and theorist, wrote in the late 16th century about “some modern men excelling in their arts,” who were not only painters but also sculptors, architects, “mathematicians, print engravers, and masters of wood, copper, and iron carving, as well as goldsmiths,” among others.
The new group exhibition conceived by ABC-ARTE at its Genoa location seeks to reaffirm and emphasize that the “fine arts,” despite the widely recognized centrality of their conceptual dimension, at their best rest necessarily upon a craftsman-like foundation where eminence is a prerequisite. This is true for Tomas Rajlich (1940) and Jerry Zeniuk (1945)—who stated: “I am interested in how to see. Seeing is thinking. Painters are conceptual artists”—prominent figures of the “Fundamentele schilderkunst: Fundamental painting,” as titled in the pivotal 1975 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It is equally true for representatives of the subsequent generation, such as Marco Tirelli (1956), who claims that “images find their reason to be works of art only in the moment of their erotic embrace with materials,” and Salvatore Cuschera (1958), a sculptor who has always “thought and lived through iron.”
The act of making, the act of creating art, is the indispensable foundation of their work because it perfectly distills the intellectual richness from which it arises, transforming it into the soul of physical experience. Their works, executed “industriously by the learned hand,” as Giorgio Vasari proclaimed, demonstrate that art is a thought that confidently desires to be transformed into tangible and definitive testimony of excellence.
The exhibition will be on view from February 20 to April 12, 2025, at the Genoa headquarters of ABC-ARTE.
The vernissage will take place on Thursday, February 20, at 6:30 PM, at Via XX Settembre 11 A, Genoa.
