Repetto Gallery is pleased to announce Carlo Scarpa: The shapes of light, from 26th September to 26th October 2018. The show, curated by Marco Arosio and Paolo Repetto, aims to display his polyhedral genius – together architect, artist and designer - collecting diverse and complementary works: around twenty glass works, from the early 30’s Cappelin, to the 40’s Venini; the very rare Crescita sculpture; the Querini Stampalia Lamp; the Tirante Olivetti; the Cross of the Monumental Complex Brion and the famous Cavalletto. A selection of drawings from the 60’s and 70’s; some furniture, cutlery and other small objects. A catalogue with texts by Marco Arosio, Charles Hind, Giulio Paolini and Paolo Repetto will be available.

During all his life, in all his work, Carlo Scarpa (Venice, Italy, 1906 – Sendai, Japan, 1978) wanted to touch and give shape to light. “For an architect, the primary thing in life is to recognise the time in the sky, the hours of the morning, the day, the evening; to know the vibrations, the halftones; to develop the visual power in order to dream things”. For Scarpa the only valid art and architecture, the only one worthy of admiration was the one he knew how to sing. Music and architecture, for him, were tied with the same capacity to captivate the man in the magical sphere of harmony: that secret order, profound, whole, capable, through the sight and the hearing, of letting us perceive for an instant, at least for an instant, the ecstatic experience, the gateway of the prison of self, the exit from the world, into the intuition of the absolute beauty as immortality.

When entering the first room of the Querini Stampalia Foundation; when coming up the first floor of the Olivetti shop and right after coming up the amazing stairs we turn right; when contemplating his beautiful glasses, probably the biggest synthesis – with the art of the sound – of the union between materiality and spirit, weight and lightness; when admiring the light that rains delicately from the trihedral windows in the square room of the Plaster Casts Gallery of Possagno; when watching his famous Cavalletto and his rare sculptures: Crescita, Contafili and Querini Stampaglia Lamp; when walking through the solid sounds of the Monumental Complex of Brion, we have perceived and we still perceive every time the shiver between the shoulders. Then we cannot be mistaken: we are in front of the divine surrounding us, we face the rarest shapes of genius.