Exhibition September – October 2017: Eugenio Pardini in Marbella

Sean Hepburn in collaboration with Es.Arte Gallery presents the collection of the Italian artist Eugenio Pardini in Marbella. Marbella will host the work of the painter Eugenio Pardini (1912-2003). The pieces that belong to the private collection of Sean Hepburn Ferrer will be located in four exhibition spaces in Marbella, Es.Arte Gallery, FM, Hotel Puente Romano and La Zagaleta.

Sean Hepburn brings the collection of the Italian artist Eugenio Pardini to Marbella, a city to which he feels especially connected since he spent long summers of his childhood in the house that his parents (Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer) had in Marbella Club. Knowing the culture and the language, he bets on the south of Spain for this great exhibition that was initially presented in Caja Granada and now in Marbella, a cosmopolitan city of great exclusivity.

In addition, the attraction that the Italian artist felt for Andalusia, so evident in his works of landscapes full of sunflowers and the bullfighting series, were also an added factor that prompted the collector to move the work to Spain.

Mr. Hepburn fell in love with Pardini’s work during a visit to the author’s home in Italian Tuscany. Since then, he has acquired most of his pieces (3,000 works), becoming the most outstanding artist in his private collection.

The exhibition has a retrospective character, gathering different stages with a variety of stylistic, thematic and technical examples. His work is enveloped in a prodigious colorfulness always sponsored by a clear and direct drawing, an oniric language where classic mythology, fertility embodied by the fruits of nature and motherhood, beauty and vitality in essence, are not exempt from refinement and subtlety.

Eugenio Pardini is a free artist, who in spite of the clear influence of the time denotes a creative lyric that leads to an investigation full of spontaneity. His sense of composition and the use of collage give him a very up-to-date style.

In 1943 he participated in the Quadrienalle di Roma and in 1948 in the XXIV Venice Biennale, the first one held after the Second World War and to which he would return in the XXV and XXVIII editions. Throughout his life he was the winner of important painting awards.

MARIO De MICHELI (art critic of the Italian avant-garde): “(…) And it is, therefore, in the last Pardini, that we can contemplate in this exhibition: brilliant in his use of color, relaxed in his composition, lyrical in his friendship with inspiration”.

Due to the magnitude of the collection, the exhibition is not reduced to a single space and in this way, we want to offer the city a new concept of exhibition. The spaces chosen are key to the development of this exhibition.

On September 7 at 19.00 hours, there will be a presentation of the exhibition of the Italian painter Eugenio Pardini in Es.Arte Gallery of Marifé Núñez (Avenida del Mediterráneo, 20. San Pedro Alcántara) from where the other exhibitions will be managed with limited/exclusive sales.

The 8 of September will be presented to the press the works of great dimensions in the Mall Fernando Moreno, next to 19:30 will be inaugurated in the Hotel Puente Romano. And, finally, on September 13 Sean Hepburn will present this novel exhibition loaded with Mediterranean magic in the Social Club of the exclusive Urbanization La Zagaleta.

An anthological tour of the work of Eugenio Pardini in Marbella.

Eugenio Pardini’s Exhibition Moments

Eugenio Pardini’s work runs like a treatise of traditional values between the outline and the figure together with a superb color. From the beginning, a border between space and figure can be seen, conditioned by one of the most used terms in painting: Il trattamento. If one learns to master this frontier, or in other words, to understand the stylization of the plastic language in certain contexts, we understand its tendency, besides the conclusion of the pictorial fact and its iconicity, in this way we assimilate Pardini’s painting in all its extension.

The perception in the enunciated category is a simple variable of possibilities that demonstrates the creative capacity through aesthetic ranges. It is here where the artist decides his trajectory, which can be limited or extended according to those variables we have talked about, without programming in depth up to what point he can limit what he has learned and live with his protean creativity. Pardini is not an exception, his permeability is very clear and his evolution can be detected in the line, as the intermittent element of the figurative avant-garde, where all the pictorial components of a recent past become indispensable and become a hinge between recognized trends, without giving truce to that light that Fatori himself would sign as an incandescent midday light that turns into a merciless palette with a superficial, instigating, voracious and disturbing texture that provokes a luminous depth as if it were a Turner disciple or an approach to Bernardo Daddi himself, where color signs one of its best stages.

Leaving for a moment the chromatic analysis in Eugenio Pardini’s work, his trajectory is directed towards a purely organicist language, which automatically fixes the attention on movement, a combination between chromaticity and action that could even be argued as a continuation of Roberto Matta’s surrealism, marked by the gradual disintegration of the figure, which curiously reverses, when the development is usually the opposite, from experimentation to order and so on.

There is no doubt that Eugenio Pardini was a fervent admirer of the pre-avant-gardes and, on the other hand, of the avant-gardes he knew how to extract the qualities of the movement as a reason for being of the French colorists who added a primitivism, not only to the figures but to the conscience. This means that the artist’s sensations can be intuited even if they are not evident on the canvas, even if they are only the push towards a figuration that flows per se but that is carried out in a scheme that values certain tendencies in unison.

In the emergence of color as a legacy in Eugenio Pardini, there is the same eagerness for revelation as that of the consecrated artists of the Paris circle, carrying implicitly their idiosyncrasies, their places of origin, the trajectories, even, in many of them, one can detect conscience; and thus universal themes such as death, hope, desire and despair. One only has to go back to the exact moment, and see beyond reality, like detecting the shadows of Camile Pisarre, the gradual darkening of Cézanne, the simplicity of Dufy or the vibrant sound of Van Gogh himself. Everything influences and nothing happens, and therefore, there we find the renovating artist, the artist who has captured the work as a retinal product and not as an exercise in mimesis. Because nothing invokes the order, the evolution, the aesthetic and plastic nihilism of the style that marks an assimilation of data without decoding. Pardini with its very personal style meets these parameters.

The Mediterranean character in Pardini is the phase that presents the greatest spatial ambiguities, with a more open language it recreates a configuration of attrezzo, an exaltation of nature, forms that determine its environment. Lighted silhouettes, a certain instability, where life is developed, not only of the artist but also of the work. Within a “performatic” character between the landscape and the artist we find numerous examples that would develop this symbiosis of equal degree. But I believe that the most attractive and committed, in this order of reflections, are The painters of the Skagen coast, the realistic painters of the Spanish east coast and the northern coast of Tuscany, where Eugenio Pardini comes from. The examples closest to Pardini are undoubtedly: Fatori and Modigliani and Il Risurgimiento. This last movement mentioned is one of the most disturbing and unknown, and it goes through the skin of Pardini’s works, and seems to draw all its essence, if we understand painting as a great cogwheel where each artist extracts his arguments from concatenated reactions.

With this type of artist, with such a suggestive work, one can fall into the trap of styles and the creation of trends and what is worse, pigeonhole the artist in a certain movement, which can lead us to totally wrong arguments, understanding art as a linear achievement or a superimposition of small details that usually contaminate what is really underneath a representation that is usually the capture of a single argument that dispenses with mechanical action or the simple fact of painting to take the final step towards what we could call the plastic interlocution of pictorial language.

Eugenio Pardini reaches the culmination of his own language, which determines the intuition of the spectator, who would find it difficult to analyze the work without the capture of the artist himself. An artist born in an era and in a city prone to contemplation. Unlike other periods whose common denominator is based on physical, geometric, fragmented or dissociated criteria. Modigliani already presented physical and geometric aspects, unlike Klee who pointed to fragmentation or Lucian Freud who tended towards a treatment of textures. In Pardini we find the scenography, the setting. And so he shows the generic existence and his in particular.

Pedro Pizarro, Málaga, 21th August of 2017.