Inauguration of the exhibition "Painting as the language of the mind"

Prof. Michele Tison will hold an introductory conference to the exhibition, reminding us that the Galleria Romano Tabacchi, located at Via Arsenale 1 in Pieve di Cadore, hosts a collective exhibition promoted by the Pigmenti Association of Belluno, an organization that has been developing research and training activities for years on the relationships between Neuroaesthetics, visual languages, and artistic practices.

The gallery, recently returned to the cultural life of the area as a space dedicated to experimentation and dialogue between contemporary art and the historical context of Cadore, represents the ideal place to host a project that puts painting at the center as a form of knowledge.

The guiding idea of the project is simple yet radical: painting has its own grammar, made up of color, matter, gesture, rhythm, light, transparencies, density, and spatial relationships. Before representing something, it constructs meanings through these fundamental elements.

It is precisely this conception of the pictorial language, also supported by contemporary studies on the functioning of visual perception and cognition, that forms the foundation of the research of the Pigmenti Association.

The exhibited works — many of which are large in size — do not seek to tell a story or describe a recognizable subject. Instead, they invite the visitor to experience the painting itself, allowing color, surface quality, the movement of the mark, and the strength of the gesture to generate emotions, reflections, and inner images.

While sharing a common theoretical ground, each artist develops a personal and recognizable language, demonstrating how rigorous research can produce extremely different, coherent, and authentic results.

A journey between gesture, matter, and vision The exhibition unfolds as a journey through various possibilities of pictorial language.

Some works construct wide, breath-taking spaces through light glazes, transparent fields, and large curves that seem to expand beyond the edges of the canvas. The blues and greens interact with whites in a continuous oscillation between depth and surface, suggesting inner landscapes, movements of water or air without ever describing them directly.

Painting thus becomes an experience of flow, continuity, and transformation. Other works rely instead on the tension between solids and voids. Large silent surfaces are traversed by a few essential marks, as if they were traces of an original writing.

Here, subtraction becomes a form of intensity: each line, each interruption, each balance between light and shadow acquires a meditative value that recalls a metaphysical dimension.

There are also works where color thickens in deep, almost mineral fields, where the pictorial matter seems to hold time. Dark tones crossed by sudden bright flashes construct suspended images, in which light slowly emerges from shadow like memory or revelation.

Alongside abstraction, there is also a painting that, while maintaining a strong gestural freedom, brings forth the human face.

In the large portraits, the subject is not described in a photographic manner but emerges from the matter through layers, erasures, and quick marks.

The face thus becomes the place where interiority and emotion take shape directly in the painting. Finally, there are works in which the reference to the landscape remains recognizable but deeply transformed.

Mountains, ice, horizons, and reflections on water are not simply natural views: they become essential structures of the gaze, opportunities to explore the relationship between perception, memory, and the construction of the image.

In all the works, a shared conviction emerges: painting is not a language of the past, but a tool still capable of questioning our way of seeing and thinking.

In an era dominated by the speed of digital images, these canvases require time, attention, and presence, restoring to the pictorial gesture its ability to produce experience.

Thus, the exhibition represents not only a collective display but the result of a shared research that intertwines artistic practice, theoretical reflection, and the study of perceptual processes.

An invitation to look at painting not as a simple representation of reality, but as one of the deepest languages through which humans continue to explore the world and themselves.

Free entry without reservation.