TEACHER – He would have turned 99 in February and until a few months ago he was still painting. Art, together with love for family, were in fact his whole life. The Venetian painter passed away yesterday morning after an illness that had recently afflicted him George of Venus. Born in Mestre in 1927, he had been passionate about painting since he was very young, attending the Art Institute of Venice, where then as an adult, from 1968 to 1983, he taught chalcography and woodcut, precisely in that graphic arts laboratory where as a boy he had had his first artistic experiences. “
THE MEMORY
«Giorgio Di Venere, taking full advantage of the characteristics and different possibilities of techniques and materials, has given life in his works to a vast variety of lines, shapes, planes, only apparently simple and elementary, but in reality lyrically very calibrated. All built through the fluid energy of a ductile and crystalline color that we find in the great tradition of Venetian painting but also in Cezanni’s lesson”, comments his friend Dino Marangon, teacher, art critic and editor of the volume “Di Venere. From sign to colour”. Thanks to the Venetian Engravers Association, which had welcomed him into its ranks since 1960, Giorgio Di Venere had the opportunity to exhibit in countless exhibitions both in Italy and abroad.
THE PATH
«However, my father always remained very attached to his city, says his son Paolo, and his interest in drawing and painting developed above all here, in the Venetian countryside and in the Caorle lagoon, places often depicted in paintings and graphics». As Dino Marangon explains, Giorgio Di Venere’s artistic production has changed over time: «From the severe and collected works of the 1960s, animated by fishermen intent on narrating the toil of everyday life, to the monochrome and highly refined engravings of the 1980s, to the colorful visions of suburbs, in which geometrizing figurations were integrated».
«In the nineties – adds Marangon – stylization becomes more and more essential in the forms, until the beginning of the new millennium, discovering metaphysical traits in everyday life: now the outline of a church, now the profiles of fascinating islands, now Venetian views”. Since 1957 the artist has participated several times in the annual collective exhibitions of the Bevilacqua La Masa work, obtaining, in 1960, the first prize for drawing and the following year the first prize for engraving. Among the main exhibitions, the one at the prestigious Casa dei Carraresi in Treviso in 1998, at Palazzo delle Contesse in Mel in 2007, at the Candiani Cultural Center in Mestre in 2014 and at Villa Brandolini in Pieve di Soligo, in 2022. Giorgio Di Venere, who received the lifetime achievement award of the Mestre Painting Award in 2022, leaves behind his children Paolo, Roberto, Elisabetta and Anna and his wife Rosalinda whom he married in 1963. «Our father taught us many things: cultivating one’s passions, trying not to have regrets in life and, above all, love for the family», his children remember him with emotion. The date of the funeral has not yet been decided.
