Antonello Viola: L’oro della laguna

Palmarola, Marettimo, Ponza, Vulcano—but also Murano and Giudecca—inspire Antonello Viola’s glass works, where veils of colour, erasures, and transparencies settle over time. These islands, with shifting borders and flickering reflections, echo Venice itself. Viola’s glass engages with the city’s legacy of light, sky, and water, translating it into gold, turquoise, and blue on a fragile, transparent surface that magnifies colour, layering, and fluid resonance.

Alongside this, on delicate Japanese paper, Viola composes space and time through addition and subtraction of colour and metal, imagining open and closed surfaces. These material landscapes recall Giulio Aristide Sartorio’s Poema della vita umana, evoking a dialogue between contemporary practice and historical painting.

Viola’s works—through processes of layering, distillation, and compression—whisper echoes of the past. Flesh and earth tones suggest skin, foundations, and flows: not places of separation, but thresholds between sea and city. Lines like ancient borders emerge and submerge in colour, recalling Venice’s fondamenta, shaped by tides and light. As painting refuses fixed edges, Viola’s art opens fully to the body, the city, and the movement of water and time.