The exhibition ALIGI SASSU - “Mediterranean” will open at Villa Fiorentino (Corso Italia 53) Sorrento on Friday 15 July 2011 at 7pm, organised by architect Marisa Zattini di Cesena. A considerable number of works by this artist chosen from the period 1930 to 1997 will decorate the hall interiors of this beautiful venue designed by Augusto Pompili. Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, sketches brimming with sun and fragrance, come from private collections and the Aligi Sassu Archive, works rich in chromatic meaning that have translated the “Mediterranean” sentiment of Maestro Aligi Sassu in a combination of strong, highly personal colours from red to orange, fuchsia to blue. Figures, landscapes, horses, bullfighting, the “Uomini rossi” (Red men), cafés, maisons… all with the unmistakeable mark of Sassu and all produced strictly from the 1930s onwards. Aligi Sassu’s approach was stylistic, almost a return to primitive roots in the search for essence. The title is meant to ‘depict’ the legend of the Mediterranean that has found its way into every European culture, influencing painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture. And there is no doubt that “our” Artist qualifies as one of its major interpreters. This exhibition, in fact, is a tribute to “Mediterranean beauty”. Aligi Sassu is definitely one of the leading Italian artists of the 20th century, who lived his “Mediterranean- ness” to the full, seen in the primitive energy he expertly expressed in all his works, the obsession for depth and a search for beauty that this subject roused in him through the years of his career, and the force and constance that the Artist developed so well throughout his life… a triumph of creative movement and vitality. The Mediterranean, intended as a “focal point” for his imagery, became a landscape of the soul on which the origins of an extraordinary Greek-Latin culture are founded. It is the intense, captivating setting of his much-loved Sardinia, of Sicily and Majorca, perfectly suited to Aligi Sassu’s power of colour - that rich chromatic vitality that flows through all his drawings, canvases and the entire corpus of his ceramic and sculptural works. A visionary artist then, who knew how best to explore and interpret the “Mediterranean and mythical” dimension, through his own artistic studies, seen and experienced as a metaphor par excellence of man’s “theatrum mundi”.