Ravenna is dedicating an art exhibition to Philippe Artias (1912-2002), a French painter, ceramist and designer with strong ties to Italy, where he spent the last thirty years of his life, thanks in part to his close friendship with another painter, Remo Brindisi. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Saint’Etienne in the 1930s, Artias held various positions of responsibility during the resistance to Nazism, which earned him the Legion of Honour, before beginning his successful career as an artist. He moved to the Côte d’Azur in 1947, where he made important acquaintances, first with Edouard Pignon, then with Pablo Picasso, with whom he collaborated for five years in Vallauris, then the French capital of ceramics. From 1960 to 1973, he was a regular at the Salon de Mai, in 1965 at the Venice Biennale, then at important international exhibitions, galleries and public museums in the United States, Japan, Brazil and various European capitals. The exhibition in Ravenna seeks to recount Artias’ art through a selection of paintings and video testimonials linked to his most intense and passionate pictorial cycles. “A painting of struggle”, as the artist himself defined it, perpetually suspended between form and colour, body and nature, reality and abstract sign.
Opening Saturday 21 March at 6 p.m.