Paola Angelini's 'Splendor Solis' at Ca' Pesaro

Italian artist Paola Angelini (born 1983, San Benedetto del Tronto) transformed Ca' Pesaro's Galleria internazionale d'arte moderna in Venice into her temporary studio in October 2020, creating the large-scale painting 'Splendor Solis' for the museum's Project room. The work, left intentionally open and unfinished, evolves daily throughout the exhibition, engaging with the museum's collection through a dialogue that avoids mere homage. Angelini describes it as a 'work in progress' that can accommodate different moments of thought, reflections on figuration, composition, and pictorial matter. The painting features hieratic figures alternating with sketched presences, sculptural heads, and a reclining sleeping figure on a partially shadowed plane. The project was conceived as a way to work on the present while holding the past in tension, inviting the public into an artist's studio within a historic museum.