Ettore Spalletti

1940, Cappelle sul Tavo (Pescara), Italy - 2019, Spoltore (Pescara), Italy

Ettore Spalletti was one of the most lyrical and rigorous figures in Italian contemporary art. His work, suspended between painting and sculpture, is grounded in an essential dialogue between light, colour and space. From the 1970s onward, he developed a consistent, meditative practice, in which monochrome surfaces and geometric forms engage with architecture and with the viewer's sensory experience.

Through a masterful use of colour - often applied in layers of powdery, matte, hand-worked impasto - Spalletti turned painting into a tactile, atmospheric presence. His works, always elegant and silent, are suspended visions that invite contemplation, evoking a slow, inward sense of time. He has been exhibited in the world's leading museums, including MoMA in New York, Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale.

Azzurro tenue, argento (Soft Blue, Silver) is a work that holds within it the entire poetics of Ettore Spalletti. A perfect square, made on panel with a dense, velvety application of colour that becomes almost luminous dust. Colour here is not merely a shade, but a physical presence, a breath. 

The blue - light, transparent, spiritual - spreads through space with absolute delicacy, while the tapered frame introduces a sculptural element, a perceptual shift that turns the painting into an object, a threshold between the visible and the invisible.
The silvered edge, achieved with a gold and silver impasto, introduces a soft reverberation that shifts with the light and the angle of view, heightening the work's sacred, tactile dimension. Within this seemingly simple surface lies a complex alchemy of colour, matter, geometry and silence.

Spalletti does not paint, he listens to colour. And he entrusts it to us as a space to inhabit with our gaze.