Gondola In Venice

oil on masonite

45 x 38 cm

Signed lower left "Ugo Celada da Virgilio"

Ugo Celada was born in 1895 in Virgilio, in the province of Mantua, hence the addition of "da Virgilio" to his name, almost a proud reference to the Latin poet, a native of Mantua. He attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Reggio Emilia, then moved on to the School of Applied Art in Mantua, before perfecting his skills at the Brera Academy in Milan, where he attended Cesare Tallone's courses.

He exhibited for the first time in 1913 at the Permanente in Milan, but the following year he gave up painting to enlist as a volunteer in the First World War. At the end of the conflict, he devoted himself exclusively to pictorial research, also making an important educational trip to Paris, which brought him into contact with new European artistic developments.

He participated in the 1920 Venice Biennale. Celada's pictorial direction is already very clear: he expresses himself with a lenticular and precise realism, played out entirely on the transparency of colour that appears vivid and clean, almost evocative of the absence of an atmosphere.

Places and non-places, still lifes and nudes are inserted in rarefied and surreal settings, but at the same time very close to tangible reality. Participating in the climate of a return to the ancient order, Celada however did not officially join either Valori Plastici or the Novecento group, although he exhibited with it on several occasions.

At the 1924 Biennale he sent Ritratto di contadino (Portrait of a Peasant) and at the 1926 Biennale Distrazione (Distraction), the painting that earned him praise from the critics. In this period, he came very close to the illusionistic and realist style of Gregorio Sciltian and what would later become the Modern Reality Painters in the 1940s.

Trompe l'œil, still lifes, alienating, enigmatic and solemn atmospheres are all based on glacial tones and clear, precise drawing. In the early 1930s, he broke with the official movements and signed an anti-Novecento Manifesto with other painters from Mantua. From this moment on, he would live far from exhibitions to dedicate himself to meticulous and constant research that would last until the 1950s and that would always have an objective description of reality at its centre. In 1959, he founded the Movimento dei Pittori Oggettivisti with which he exhibited at Galleria Cairola in Milan.

He painted until the 1970s and died at the age of 100 in Varese in 1995. It was only later that he was rediscovered by critics, although he remains an unquestionably popular artist in the Lombardy and Emilian areas, especially among his loyal collectors.