Vittorio Zecchin

wool tapestry on jute; 40 x 150 cm
Registration: bottom left "VZ"
For the long decorative panel, embroidered in the Zecchin Laboratory of Murano, the artist imagined a dense birch forest immersed in a fairytale and suspended atmosphere, adopting a subject repeatedly addressed also in painting, both as an autonomous landscape and as a background for more complex compositions. The vegetable decoration developed in the fabric panel is not declined in a naturalistic key, but with an expressive synthesis and a graphic design on the edge of abstraction, the result of different suggestions and artistic references. Zecchin, in fact, shows not only an interest in the tradition of Murrini glass, but also evident references to the Byzantine preciousness and the rigorous stylization of the forms, filtered through the lesson of the Viennese Secession and the works of Gustav Klimt, which the artist had to see on the occasion of the 1910 Venice Biennale. The silhouettes of trees and flowers are defined by flat backgrounds of colors, limited to a selected chromatic range that accentuates the repetitiveness and the tight compositional rhythm. The love for colors and the ability to combine them with wisdom and imagination were already emphasized by Roberto Papini: "He loves colors like magpie loves gems, for a naive and passionate instinct. And he is exalted by the games of polychrome by spreading the treasures of his exquisite sensitivity of color in circles, in stars, in waves, in points, in leaves, in flowers, among the rigid shapes of his figures of Byzantine origin "(Papini 1921 , p. 112). The work probably corresponds to the decorative band exhibited at the first regional art exhibition, held in Treviso in 1921.
Bibliography: I. de Guttry, in Gabriele D’Annunzio 1988, pp. 229-230, no. 353; Vittorio Zecchin 2002, p. 267, no. 321; Alfons Mucha 2016, pp. 233, 254.
Stefania Cretella

Author: Vittorio Zecchin
Dimensions: cm. 40 x 150
Year: 1916