Valentino sponsors "Pittura Italiana Oggi", Triennale Milano 2023

ART MEETS FASHION October 2023

Pierpaolo Piccioli explains his fascination with art

"It gives endless opportunities, the type of which is never said or pre-established."

Maison Valentino sponsors the centenary exhibition of the Triennale Milano.

By Lizzie Fedi

10. OCTOBER 2023

Guglielmo Castelli, "About today" - Valentino HC Des Ateliers - Courtesy Maison Valentino

Fashion, 10 October 2023: Many designers attempt a dialogue between art and fashion. The one who has mastered it is Maison Valentino from Rome. Chief designer Pierpaolo Piccioli prefers to move in the circle of artists, musicians, writers, whom the house also promotes.

The complexity of contemporary Italian painting

Now Valentino is sponsoring the centenary exhibition of the Milan Triennale. The exhibition, which will open in October 2023, is intended as a tribute to contemporary Italian painting.

"Pittura Italiana Oggi" will feature 120 of the most fascinating Italian artists from the 1960s to the year 2000. The theme is inspired by the mural painting exhibitions organised at the Palazzo dell'Arte in 1933, as well as Luciano Baldessari's project for the 9th International Exhibition in 1951. Damiano Gullì, curator of the exhibition confessed: "A remarkably vibrant scene has emerged. By drawing on its own history, the Triennale has taken up the challenge of presenting contemporary painting in all its complexity and providing an opportunity to analyse the scene and promote and enhance it both in our country and in the world."

A dialogue between art and fashion: Valentino on Canvas

Five of the artists on show - Benni Bosetto, Guglielmo Castelli, Francis Offman, Andrea Respino and Sofia Silva - have already collaborated with the house. Based on the artworks, a haute couture collection was developed; we show the most beautiful photos here. Collaborations with artists fall under the "Valentino On Canvas" brand pillar. In 2020 and 2021, the house hosted Re-signify Parts I and II in Shanghai and Beijing, looking at the heritage of the house through the perspective of art. In 2022, the House sponsored the Italian Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia.

Guglielmo Castelli, "About today" - Valentino HC Des Ateliers - Courtesy Maison Valentino

Read also the introduction of the chief designer Pierpaolo Piccioli to "Pittura Italiana Oggi" here.

If I called myself an art expert I would be lying. However, I can say with certainty that I have come across art many times, sometimes by chance, others not. I stopped to look, to feel, sometimes to admire, other times just to follow an instinct. I am curious, impressionable, in the literal sense of the word. Every time my attention guides me towards an image, I always end up taking it with me and keeping it in a kind of archive of the mind where then, at a certain point, something happens, a connection, a colour, a face, end up in my work, in a way that’s not always rational or logical, in fact it almost never is. I remember that for my first collection as Creative Director of Valentino, I was obsessed with Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights and obsessed is the right word because I kept looking at it and when I wasn’t looking at it, I thought about it, because the images, the marks had left furrows, tracks that I needed to follow, to fill. It pushed me to think beyond, to ask myself questions which at that moment were the questions I needed, it was a key to something I had yet to understand and which I understood when I began to turn my hand to the collection. The reflection on that work was a key for me that opened doors, derailed convictions, that put me in a position to prove myself at a crucial moment. That’s it, that’s what art does, that is what it does to me. It gives endless opportunities, the type of which is never said or pre- established. There is a good dose of mystery that can and perhaps should remain thus.

I have always thought that art and fashion were two separate and distinct things and that they should remain so. This is not a form of cultural elitism, on the contrary, it is a recognition of the substance that each is made of. When we started working on the Valentino Des Ateliers collection that is what I had in mind: observing the result of a dialogue between fashion and art, allowing the two to rub up against and talk to each other, in the geographical and emotional space of the Atelier, the place they have in common, the place where you sit to do, think, undo, finish and start again. I knew in that moment that we were all, us and the artists involved in the project, uncertain and curious, moved by a kind of frenzy that pushed us to look for a way to transmit our thoughts into something that was visible, real, tangible but that nevertheless kept intact the different languages it brought with it. Des Ateliers was born from an urgent need to engage in a moment of physical and also somewhat cultural isolation, of non-engagement. And art, and perhaps creativity, always arise from a reflection and a need dictated by the time in which we live.

Maison Valentino is today a community that generates community, that seeks out spaces and means for creativity, that flanks and supports initiatives that are opportunities to engage and, I hope, think. That experience probably laid the foundations for an approach to the art world that today flows into this Triennale di Milano. One hundred twenty works are on display, 120 possibilities, roads, keys, dreams. In this atelier, which is not an atelier but I like to think of it as such, the human complexity that drives the exhibition unfolds along free, or rather liberating, pathways. If you really think about it, it’s precisely this complexity that ensures the absence of constraints, the interpretative fluidity that connects different works, different arts, ages, geographic origins, different ideas and all this confirms for me again that the only true wealth, the only essential source of creation and hope are not shared characteristics, but those that distinguish us.

Pierpaolo Piccioli

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