The fifteenth

The painter Concetto Pozzati (photo Ansa)

A painter who never accepted being pigeonholed into a specific school of thought, a “corsair” painter who made theft a decisive imprint of his art. Concetto Pozzati is a prominent name in Bologna, and it is for this reason that the city has decided to pay homage to him by staging a small retrospective dedicated to his confrontation/duel with his friend/enemy Giorgio Morandi, another Bolognese genius. The free exhibition, entitled “Concetto Pozzati. From and for Morandi”, can be visited until March 15, inside the rooms of the Morandi House Museum, in via Fondazza. The aim of this excursus into the work of Pozzati (an exponent of various currents, for example surrealism, informal art and pop art) is to shed light on the stylistic dialogue between him and Morandi, towards whom he had mixed feelings: on the one hand he did not appreciate his vision and his person, on the other he still recognized in his work a powerful cosmos of tradition and innovation, a mixture of provincialism and modernity, almost as if to reflect Bologna itself, always in the balance, always between these two fires conceptual. Although the paintings on display are few, Pozzati’s evolutionary path clearly emerges, from the creation of an informal and visceral language, which relates to a colder and more rational one, to the plunder from the object world of Morandi’s workmanship. Here the techniques adopted by Pozzati are varied, both thin and coarse brushstrokes, writing done with oil colors and “stapled collage” first and foremost. In these canvases the objects become an enigma, a mirror of the artist’s solitude, prisoner of his domestic laboratory, as well as the hotbed of his creations. Something taken from Morandi and then dedicated to Morandi, only with the right amount of desecrating. Because ultimately art is also this: pure distortion.

The review is taken from issue 12 of “Fifteen” of 29 January 2026