Luigi Pagan, Lungo Il Canal Vena (chioggia)

Luigi Pagan
Chioggia, 1907 – 1980

Along the Canal Vena (from Ponte S. Andrea), 1967
Signature bottom left: Pagan
oil on panel cm. 20×100 within a frame for a total of cm. 32.5×113

The painting, in excellent condition, depicts one of the most characteristic views of Chioggia and certainly among the painter's most loved. The narrow and long format provides an almost quadrangular format view of the photographer of the Canal Vena in Chioggia taken from the Sant'Andrea Bridge (as can be read in Pagan's handwritten writing on the back of the panel).

The lively and bright colors of a city captured in its most realistic aspect are striking, with the figures walking along the banks and bridges, the moored boats, the buildings in the style of the Serenissima. Born to a family of fishermen, Pagan was characterized from a young age by his pictorial sensitivity and rebellious character. Throughout his existence he painted his people, scenes of fishermen and courtyards with rapid brushstrokes fervent with chromaticism and moving poetry. At 17 he ran away from home to go to Turin where he worked as a worker, an employee and a set decorator for the theater in order to pay for a painting master and when he felt able to express and bring out what he had inside , the nostalgia of his sea and his people brings him back to Chioggia, where he will continue to study painting by going to the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Soon his artistic merits will be recognized by the luminaries of the time and we are talking about Milesi, Bazzaro, Pavan, Brombo and Galimberti who encouraged him and welcomed him, also giving him prizes at exhibitions and competitions. With Brombo and Galimberti he will form a deep friendship and a fruitful collaboration. In 1936 he began to exhibit at the Bevilaqua La Masa; the same in 1937, the year in which he also exhibited in Cavarzere, Bologna, Venice Cà Pesaro and several times in his native Chioggia. A life of successes, especially in the two decades between the 1950s and 1970s, which brought him to the most important national collections and those of the great lovers of twentieth-century Venetian painting.