The Four III, 1970

Claudio Verna is a member of the generation of artists who found themselves having to justify and defend their choice to paint, during a period when critical debate maintained that the history of pictorial language, seen as a whole, has reached its conclusion with the end of Art Informel.

“To speak about painting,” Verna wrote in 1972, “signifies also specifying that this medium (medium and not category of the spirit) does not have any privileged or reductive position in terms of any other material. One cannot speak of painting in the abstract, but only in reference to a particular type of work.” [...]