… Del Coraggio Quotidiano

Stefano Jus

… Del Coraggio Quotidiano
Alfabeti tra il magnetismo di Nicola Grassi e i graffiti di Stefano Jus

Curated by Enrico Lucchese and Alessandra Santin
December, 7 , 2022 – February, 5, 2023

Looking to the past to eye the future and knowingly show the present. This is the research process of Stefano Jus, master and artist from Friuli among the most accredited at national level.

His works received in the exhibition halls of Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo represent the artist’s accurate reflection directed to the present existence and to the reality we “inhabit”; reality which requires the day-to-day courage to each one of us.
Not for nothing, in the work Il coraggio di Davide [David’s courage], the iconographic pivot of the whole exhibition, by the overlapping of large size tridimensional bricks where fragments of ancient and modern art history masterpieces coexist with present snapshots, Stefano Jus expresses his denunciation and his warning towards the contemporary tragedies and the bafflement which we all feel in front of the uncertainties we live and “suffer” every day.

On the contrary when he is meant to keep a dialogue with the eighteenth-century works by Nicola Grassi (the exhibition will show two of them, depicting Saint Filippo Neri and Saint Lorenzo Giustiniani, both belonging to the art Collections of I.P.A.V. – Istituzioni Pubbliche di Assistenza Veneziane), Jus reinterprets the luministic values of the Carnic painter, known overall for the brilliant and iridescent colours of his paintings, returning on the canvas corpi-ombra [shadow bodies] composed of graffiti and materic removals: empty solids whose formal dimensions look enigmatic and create presences without time and without place. His review is a monochrome one, centred on the low and bituminous shades of the concrete, spread with wide and decisive gestures. Jus’ colours are the deep black and the materic greys, which blend in light-blue, windy and brilliant touches, in order to emphasize the becoming of life and the circularity of events.