An exhibition by Claudio Verna (Guardiagrele in Abruzzo, 1937) is a precious opportunity for all painting-lovers. In fact, Verna is considered one of the most important painters of his generation.

The works on display – around 15 of them are large-sized – confirm that the common denominator which has been unifying the various stages of Verna's career from the Fifties up to the present day is his almost obsessive passion for colour/light.

Verna is actually a pure colourist, and his colour is among the most beautiful that contemporary Italian art managed to generate. Obviously, we are talking about a structuring colour, that can create space without the support of drawing. In his theoretical writings, containing remarks of rare lucidity about the issues related to making art nowadays, Verna identifies in colour the actual essence of painting, arguing that, as men perceive reality through their own eyes and see a colourful world, if painting is colour, it will never exhaust its innovative potentialities. Unless, of course, it falls into a tired repetition of the old codes. Actually, the prime task of the artist-painter is to stick to tradition, while constantly throwing it into question, thus combining the compulsory hazard of innovation with the continuity of a thousand-year old history.

A task that Verna, a painter of balance as well as of light and colour, has been setting himself since the very beginning of his career.