Fantastic painters in the Po Valley is the art of our time, our space and the imagination of 42 fantastic artists, whatever meaning we want to give to this adjective. We are in Ferrara, that is, in the last stretch of the Po Valley, a geographical and poetic definition (in the manner of Mario Soldati) that designates the entire basin from Monviso to the Delta, including the mountainous initial section.
This is more than an exhibition of contemporary art: it is an exhibition of living art, like all its protagonists. And much more than a generically Italian or even more generically international art exhibition: it is the exhibition of peculiarly Po Valley art. Beauty that, in this form, could not exist elsewhere.
For many paintings exhibited “fantastic” has value as hyperbole, as a superlative and admiring adjective. For many others it also means “created by fantasy, or in which fantasy has a predominant part,” as the surreal compensates for the flatness of the real, and the most bizarre dream springs from the most uniform plain.
All the artists in the exhibition were born or live near Italy’s longest river. All the works are linked to the territory: some already existing, many created specifically to recreate the humanistic, and therefore human, connection between places and patrons, between places and art. Cities, towns, bridges, churches, parks, rice fields, fish, patron saints, characters from Ovid or Ariosto or modern life are pictorially celebrated, animated by the breath of art understood as compensation and therapy.
Fantastic painters in the Po Valley brought Ferrara back to the center of artistic production and set out to reactivate the glorious polycentrism of the Po Valley now suffering from the very strong attraction exerted by Milan. Once again, so many years after the Ferrara Workshop and Metaphysical Art, great Italian artists appeared on the banks of the Po and began to paint.

Edited by.
Camillo Langone

Organizers
Art Museum Service and Ferrara Art Foundation

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