Vanni Viviani (1937-2002) - A viviani Magritte

Vanni Viviani was born in 1937 in the province of Mantua, in San Giacomo delle Segnate. In Bolzano he began his artistic activity, initially focused on painterly and sculptural figuration and, in the 1970s, he moved to Milan, the capital of European art, where he felt the need to pass from the collective of sheaves to the individuality of the “Apple,” an allusive and erotic symbol, fruit of religions, fables, science and heroes, which evokes important moments of the past—from Paride’s Golden Apple to Piero della Francesca’s religiosity—to end with Magritte-like surrealism, with the apple as a symbol of life, sensuality, a place of ideas. Criticism followed him with growing interest in his creative arc; Mario De Micheli spoke of him as “Viviani, a prodigious gardener of an incorrupt apple orchard”; Renzo Margonari, “Viviani does not paint apples but human nudes.” It is in 1988 that Viviani leaves the old Bohemian Brera quarter in Milan to return to his homeland and his Virgilian origins: he invents Villa Ca di Pom, heaped with meanings of his work, materializing his universe in the conquest of his most intimate identity. And it is precisely the “pom” - the apple – the subject of the works in the Foundation BAM collection: 38 large-format paintings, a stained glass window and a polychrome maiolica, all kept in the vault. Not to be forgotten, in 2002, the last great anthological exhibition “Pom Aria,” at the Fruttifere of Palazzo Te in Mantua, which synthesizes his artistic life, from the sheaves to the apples, to conclude with grand sculptures in hollowed-out iron sheets, which highlight in the negativity of representation the “Soul” of his characters from Adam to Daphne and to the Totemic Angels.