Gino Rossi

Gino Rossi, born into a wealthy family in Venice in 1884, had an early interest in art and attended Foscarini school until 1898. Little is known about his life between leaving school and his trip to Paris with Arturo Martini in 1906-1907, except that he married painter Bice Levi Minzi in 1903 and studied privately with the Russian painter Schereschevsky. By 1905, Rossi had his own studio in Palazzo Pesaro.

In Paris, Rossi studied with the renowned Spanish artist Anglada, but he felt the need to expand his horizons. He explored the works of Medardo Rosso, Cézanne, Art Nouveau, and the Fauves, and was particularly influenced by the Nabis artists Sérousier, Lacombe, Denis, and Bernard. His admiration for Matisse and Van Gogh, and especially Gauguin, became the foundation of his artistic style. He also studied Medieval and Flemish art in Parisian museums and made a trip to the Netherlands to study it more thoroughly. His fascination with Byzantine mosaics and Oriental ceramics hinted at a Nabis-like sensibility, which combined ethics and aesthetics in a mystical approach to art. This sensibility fully developed during his second trip to Brittany in 1909, following in Gauguin's footsteps.

Rossi participated in the first and third shows at Ca’ Pesaro in 1908 and 1909, respectively, and developed a lifelong friendship with Barbantini. In 1910, he settled in Burano, where he established his reputation at Ca’ Pesaro with works such as La fanciulla del fiore, Il muto, and Case a Burano. He painted with flat applications of pure, anti-naturalistic, and enamelled color, often enclosed in Gauguin-like cloisonnées lines. Occasionally, he incorporated the sinuous decorative lines of Matisse, and at times, he used the outlines of a tortuous expressionism inherited from Van Gogh. This approach defined the rough fishermen from Brittany or Burano in some portraits, mostly dating from 1912-1913. During his time in Burano, Rossi often went to Asolo, which inspired landscapes with relationships between marks and colors that at times almost approached abstraction, as seen in Grande descrizione asolana, 1912.