Recent Review

Voluptuous Sensory Gratification

by Mithras Wissenchaften reprinted from Hohe Warte

“Still Life” Hollinger Contemporary Fine Art 18-45A Schwarzenbergplatz Vienna, Austria

January 6- March 12, 2005 Current works by Mark Venaglia Michelle Hollinger, Gallery Director

“Still indeed! The splendid exhibition which Michelle Hollinger has presented of Luccasian artist Marco Victorio Venaglia is as unstill and sparkling as a glass of Lambrusco. Never did the tedious definition: ‘still life,’ coined in the mid-eighteenth century in pompous French academic circles and immediately adopted into common parlance with vaguely derogatory overtones, seem so reductive and misleading. A haughty fit of taxonomic and hierarchizing pedantry may have changed the ‘silent’ world of everyday things into something inert, mummified, and dead only to be resurrected by a contemporary artist.

Mr. Venaglia creates a world in which the things surrounding us, holding us in the mute siege of memory, have souls and lives of their own, an aura which the slow accretion of gesture, affection and the artist’s gaze have bestowed gradually, day by day, upon even the most down-to earth paraphernalia of our every-day life.

Venaglia is an Italian, contemporary rendition of Spaniard Zubaran – the contemporary artist’s peculiar blend of lyricism and logic with a hearty grasp of reality, and an avid eye for beauty; a virtuoso of the palette, with a feeling for the true stuff of life. We find the most intoxicating colours and flavours of nature no less than of the many resplendent aspects of the artifact. His Botanicals parade their swollen flesh and translucent dietyship; pomegranates flaunt cascades of pips which glitter like zircon.

The artist selects and redeems vaguely Flemish antecedents and a latent fondness for over-decoration, counterbalancing them with a warmer patina of reality, a more spontaneous sense of arrangement and a varied iconographic repertoire with inexhaustible inventiveness.

Most surprising in his work, indeed, is his hoarder’s passion, the sheer quantity of the themes which inspire him, linked not only to the many influences of his training and the demands of the market, but also, clearly, to a boundless desire to probe the infinite complexity of the physical world, to grapple with every kind of object and location and surface, to sound out- with an attitude which is scientific even more than it is virtuosic, into paint, of the innumerable manifestations assumed by the world of artifacts and natural objects as they proffer themselves to our gaze.

Venaglia sends out a message of voluptuous sensory gratification, with a taste for the stagy and a masterfully deployment of perspective, light and space.”

Translated from the Viennese by Beatrice Landry

Mithras Wissenchaften is a freelance journalist, essayist and art critic, active for many years in quality book- and periodical- publishing. He has worked for the reviews L’Arte, Kalos and FMR, and has run the Rizzoli art series. A specialist in painting from the Renaissance to the present century, he works for various publica-tions and has written numerous essays, studies and monographs. He is current consultant for Eluzzo Group, is the editorial director of the Canal publishing house in Venice and runs the art review Grand Tour.

“The Connecticut Art Review” New Preston, CT November 2002

In the Hands of Nature, Recent Works by Mark Venaglia

by Marija Pavlovich McCarthy

“In the quaint heart of New Preston’s one commercial block which courses with a rushing brook lapping at its old foundations, there is a new artful establishment well worth a visit. It is Judy Hornby’s Gallery of Art which, through the month of November, has as its glorious centerpiece, a show of paintings by Venaglia.

Here, expecting the highest professionalism is quite in order, as Mark’s uncommon breadth of theme and skill of expression and sensitivity will truly astonish. Just as one salutes his command of large formats with opulent floral images, a look at his intimate paintings full of mystical space and secret narrations open a new door into his expressive opus. There is still another, rather phantom presence which seems to inhabit his botanical world. The truth is- a viewer doesn’t only observe and behold Mark’s flowers, one actually encounters them. To meet a flower in this show is to be seized by its anthropomorphic power and to accept it’s near-humanity. In as much as the finest portraits of humans possess a visual endowment of spirit and life to be considered a cultural experience, so do Mark’s floral images. They possess an inner substance which belies the mere beauty of their painted forms.

‘The struggle to create an image as real as the idea, not an image of the idea, is the point of the artist’s life,‘ wrote Jon Schueler in his magnificent ‘The Sound of Sleet.’ Mark Venaglia uses the beauty of Nature’s flora as a brush and a palette to get to the truth of the idea of human emotions and human conditions. The large face of the sunflower in his show presents (in my view) the truth itself before which one feels compelled to examine one’s own worth. Its scrutiny is felt palpably as it looms in its own glory of finite detail, as if to say that only by shielding nothing can the truth prevail. A sensual painting of an iris in tones of minor chords entitled ‘Ordained by Life’ has the warmth of a human face adorned by patterns of a life well lived and an old age well earned. What is even more surprising about Mark Venaglia’s art works is that the power and depth of his poetry is not his only voice.

He has distinguished himself with numerous public commissions of monumental scope both in Pasadena and New York City. Of some of these murals and canvas compositions this exhibit offers exquisite giclees of great decorative appeal. They have been hand-embellished with prismacolor and mica acrylic.

I find that this capability of Mark's to espouse in his work wide opposites, links him to the whole of humanity via a single work. In a painting, ‘Scarlet Landscape,’ there is a battalion of crimson petals rather sharp and ominous in the bottom third of the canvas. Or, are they a full regiment of soldiers in battle uniforms with their weapons as rigid as their intent? A beautiful oxymoron, these are to be traversed gingerly as their danger and size mercifully diminish with the distance. Only then the viewer is released into a soft, golden void. There, hope reigns and there the courage for courting danger is rewarded. It seems only now appropriate to state that Mark’s paintings’ inner wealth and communicative power are expressed in sublimely harmonious tones and that each composition attests to a rich flow of his keen sense of esthetics a steady talent, ardor and distinctive poetry.”

Ms. Marija Pavlovich McCarthy is a graduate of The Academy of Fine Art in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, the Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University, Washington DC. She has taught painting in all mediums since 1962, including the Corcoran School of Art, the Maryland College of Art and Design, the Art League in Alexandria, Virginia and, currently, the Washington Art Association in Washington, Connecticut. As an interpretive realist working in oil and watercolor, Ms. Pavlovich McCarthy’s work is included in the National Museum of Yugoslavia, the Presidential Collections of Pakistan, Palestine and Tunisia and in corporate, Congressional and private collections in America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Recent Works by Mark Venaglia at Judy Hornby Fine Art

"In these days of changing fashions and isms in art in which verities all too often seem to have been forgotten in fads and fancies of the moment, it is a relief to find an artist as self-reliant and devoted to the sane portrayal of beauty as Mr. Venaglia. In the artist’s most current phase, his paintings reflect a dual preoccupation. Capturing on muslin over panel with Casein Fresco in delicate, minute brushstrokes which build one-by-one to harmonious, masterful perplexities where one exists simultaneously with Flemish or Venetian interiors and cultivated gardens the viewer is transported.

He paints his subjects as if they were under a microscope. Like his earlier Organic Series, these new works insist that we contemplate a world that we think we know but may actually hardly grasp. Though eye-pleasing, the chief purpose of these paintings is to take the viewer into myopic, alternative realms. Venaglia plunges us into a highly personal, charged, and poetic relationship with our perceptions of location.

Deep reverence for the natural world abounds in the details of bright green leaves and the play of light on their surfaces. These are rhythmically juxtaposed with idealized depictions of slightly skewed rooms and their vantage points that give the appearance of being both far and near. Evinced by Venaglia's formal and conceptual contradictions at play within each carefully articulated composition, is humor both satiric and lighthearted."

-Ruth Aldrich November 2002 Housatonic Chronicle, Connecticut

“ ‘Huntington Fantasia’ murals

...stunning and atmospheric juxtaposition of color and texture...I first became aware of the artist's public work project during my stay at the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena. A whirlwind pastiche of Art Nouveau and mid Sixties hallucinations- one would not anticipate their adornment in so corporate an environment, which further enhances their status as one of Pasadena’s greatest aesthetic surprises.

Venaglia controls technique, composition, texture and a deep sense of color with the assured skill and confidence of any late Nineteenth century master. The murals’ whimsical charm camouflage an unrelenting eroticism that one finds simultaneously unsettling and captivating throughout.”

-Emily Goodrich Southern California Art Digest, March 2002

“ CONTEMPORARY REALISM at ACME Fine Art on Post Street is positively worth viewing. Capturing the organic spirit he finds within architecture from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, Mark Venaglia’s incandescent utilization of paint will absorb you. Employ-ing finely realized, Golden Age of Animation-based techniques in erotic, whimsical

depictions the artist comments on diversity and economic distinctions. Never once does he employ the word spiritual. An heroic reassessment of Chartres, “Gothic Apotheosis,” conveys a strength of vision.

With crisp, articulate draftsmanship and a penchant for saturated colors, Venaglia’s imagery is a complete parody upon camp itself. Not content with Representation for

representation’ s sake, this artist seduces with his current solo-show in as many facets as one might encounter during an entire evening of performance art. His painterly techniques do not obscure the narrative, upon closer examination I found them to be amplified.

I felt I was hearing about the art stars of an earlier generation for the first time during the effusive discussion of his own works, a highlight provided during the reception. Venaglia’s passion for art history is exuberant and refreshing. Seriously intent on developing his craft further, his appreciation of Edward Hopper, augmented with Thiebaud-esque irony are evident in works such as “Grapes of Mirth,” “Big Band Triptych“ and “Roar of the Greasepaint.” Enthusiastically acknowledging both for inspiration, this young artist is vigorously advancing Contemporary Realism.”

-Michael James Ryman Marin Independent Journal, April 1998

“Currently at Beverly Rae Fine Art is a wonderful show, modestly entitled ‘Recent Works,’ which introduces transplanted New Yorker Mark Venaglia’s paintings to Sedona. Flora and fauna are never painted in a perfunctory nor desultory manner. Instead, his subjects are naturally articulated and imbued with character and purpose. The artist’s quest for the sublime is evident in each. One may find moody spectacles of unleashed fury that foreshadow conclusions of exaltation made possible, the artist maintains, by his utilization of Casein Fresco paint. It is a masterful and compelling employment of a medium not seen exhibited here since the significant gouache paintings of Millard Sheets and Fletcher Martin.”

-Elizabeth Miller Scottsdale Progress , October 1990