PRACTICE

Valerio Abate's work revolves around the practice of writing and the relationship and distinction between figure and background: ranging from painting to installation, he investigates themes such as time, death, the threshold and the sacred in an ethical and poetic perspective.

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BIOGRAPHY

   Born in Switzerland to Italian parents in 1994, he studied visual arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Since 2016, he has been exhibiting between Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Since 2019 he has been writing for the Culture Channel of RSI (Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana) and since 2020 for the Italian magazine Antinomie.it. In 2021, he was selected for the annual training of Swiss Italian-language playwrights Luminanza. In 2022, he worked for the Museo delle Culture in Lugano. Since 2023, he has been teaching visual arts at the high school in Mendrisio (CH).

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MAIN INFLUENCES

   Laozi, Fan Kuan, Giordano Bruno, Shitao, Johann W. von Goethe, Novalis, Caspar D. Friedrich, Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Klee, Franz Kafka, Giorgio Morandi, Ernst Jünger, Mark Rothko, Giorgio Manganelli, Cristina Campo, Richard Serra, Roberto Calasso, Federico Ferrari.

   Many of his influences are anonymous or relate to individual works: think, for example, of a dolmen, a stone or wooden temple, East or West. A film by Murnau. A mountain, a tomb, a cemetery, a forest, the night and caves. Columns devoutly written in oncial Greek by a Christian monk, a haiku painted by a Buddhist calligrapher. A hymn by Beethoven, Michelangelo's Tondo. Hiroshige's formal analogies. The grapheme O, a hexagram from the I Ching. A gothic room. The painted bear in the Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave. The shadow of Petra's gates, the cypresses of Böcklin. A library, the dust on the shelf. Guo Xi's early spring, the colour of wooded hills in May near the Alps. The hieroglyphic tradition, a European or Japanese coat of arms. The bowl, an LED street lamp. A poem by Ungaretti or Leopardi, a branch in the snow, the black stone of buildings that have seen war. A leaf, an unnamed fairy tale.