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 art-making, understood as a physical gesture, technical knowledge, and, at the same time, conceptual research.
In the late 16th century, painter and theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo wrote about “some moderns excellent in their arts,” who were not only painters, sculptors, and architects, but also “mathematicians, print engravers in both wood and copper, goldsmiths,” and others.
The new group exhibition conceived by ABC-ARTE at its Genoa venue aims to reaffirm that the “fine arts,” despite the widespread acknowledgment of their conceptual dimension, at their best are necessarily rooted in a craftsmanlike background where excellence is essential. This is true for Tomas Rajlich (1940) and Jerry Zeniuk (1945) — the latter once wrote: “I’m interested in how we see. Seeing is thinking. Painters are conceptual artists.” Both are prominent exponents of Fundamentele schilderkunst: Fundamental Painting, as titled in the pivotal 1975 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
This principle also resonates in the work of artists from the following generation, such as Marco Tirelli (1956), who believes that “images find their reason to become works of art only at the moment of their erotic embrace with materials,” and Salvatore Cuschera (1958), a sculptor who has always “thought and lived through iron.”
Art-making, the act of creating art, is the essential foundation of their work, perfectly distilling the intellectual wealth from which it springs and turning it into the soul of physical experience. Their works, “industriously crafted by the learned hand,” as Giorgio Vasari once described, stand as evidence that art is a thought that does not hesitate to manifest itself as a strong, tangible, and definitive testament of excellence.
The exhibition will be on view from February 20 to April 12, 2025, at the ABC-ARTE venue in Genoa.
The vernissage will take place on Thursday, February 20, at 6:30 PM, at Via XX Settembre 11 A.
