The Painter
I dedicate this site to my father, whose passion for surrealist art allowed him to produce, in sixty years, all along his life, wonderful works that have taken part in several exhibitions all over the world. With love and affection his daughter Marzia and her husband and sons, together not to forget his son Mauro.
Biography
From 1952 to 1957 the artist, who worked as a painter and also as a designer for an Italian-American company, lived both in Brasil and Argentina.
An explosive and productive soul, in 1963 Pradella moved to San Paolo and there he planned and was also the director of the building of a small village at the border of the unwelcoming Amazon forest.
A surreal experience he says today, remembering those days as a pioneer in front of the green majesty of the largest forest in the world.
In San Paolo the artist from Verona found a cosmopolitan milieu that allowed him to widen his knowledge and let people know his excellent art of painting.
He was appointed director of the Italian-Brazilian cultural center and took part at the IX and X Biennial exhibition but the call of the native land was getting more and more irresistible. In 1971 he got back to Italy and made exhibtions in Padua, Verona, Brescia, Rome, Gardone, Turin and Genua. It was a period of great creative fertility, but a wandering spirit answers to some kind of calling that can seem illogical to other people.
And here he is again on the ship "Eugenio C." to Brazil. Pradella left definitively the Tropics and came back to Verona where he shows in the Gallery of the "Società delle Belle Arti". For many years he has been living and working in Pescantina in his house with the windows opened on the sad light blue of our mountains. In his face he is at the same time, Socrates, Chabrier and doctor Florand, with a beard of a Great Senusso. He often dresses himself in a Lincoln style and he could be seen as man of the river in "L'uomo di fiducia" by Melville. No surprise if suddenly he started to talk in verse as a noble father of the classical theatre or to eat matches like Andrè Breton. Looking at him, wandering in the pantheon of his she-popes under the turgid breast of Joan, that is both Mary Stuart and Jane of Saint Faustino, you can't help thinking about the histrionic Salvador Dalì, the excommunicated representative of the surrealist group. Too surreal? Maybe not.
Silvino Gonzato
