THE “INFORMAL” CHARM OF LAGOON LANDSCAPES.

Silvio Zago begins his pictorial experience by approaching the nineteenth-century school of realism of Courbet and Corot; he starts from a purely landscape figurativism to arrive at an informal representation where the shattering of the form prevails and integrates perfectly into the mostly lagoon landscape. The Po valley, the Po and Adige delta, the floodplains together with the fishermen’s houses, are places that allow Zago to express a painting given by spontaneity and momentary inspiration that led him to create an incessant production oriented towards immediacy of images and colours; therefore a realism of him, a way of being concretely linked to reality through a sensitivity and a way of seeing reality filtered by feelings. Zago remains the spokesperson for an uncontaminated nature where the human figure disappears and the landscape is declared the absolute protagonist.

Thus our gaze rests on the beauties of nature characterized by endless flows of water and infinite horizons giving in its own way the romantic idea of the sublime but filtered by a personal search for contact with the Venetian nature where the details get lost in the game of spatula moved by an instinctive and experienced hand.

It is not a matter of pure abstraction but of an “informal nature” where it is possible to grasp the characterizing elements of the landscape, a reality that is synthesized and dissolves in the atmosphere composed sometimes of bright colors and sometimes of darker colors, linked together to obtain a compositional balance studied and synthesized through interiority and personal experiences. This balance is obtained, in addition to the choice of colors, also by the technique that distinguishes the painter for the skilful use of the spatula and scratched effect; he spreads masses of color modeled by thin flexible spatulas giving this sense of lightness and dynamism creating atmospheric fades where architecture and nature complement each other perfectly.