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.
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
Period: 27th February to 7th March 2014
Place: Birolli palace ( former slaughter-house), Verona.
Address: 17 Macello street, Verona . Post code 37121.
Opening: 2nd March 2014- 5.00 p.m.
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Prof. Josefa Ramno Moli Nero-Yogakrisnanda
"Vinicus Pradella is an academic painter by profession, a surrealist in his heart and a magician in his spirit. Vinicius paints in a different way, too real to be fantastic, too pure to be symbolic, more intellectual and more oneiric than his own dream, where there is an awakening of passions, visions, illusions and cosmic realities. There is an erotic lyricism in his painting so free from lust but gifted with the highest tantra sexuality. He may have studied in Dionyso, Silvia and Karnac times. But his brush has travelled all over the world of an initiatory inspiration and has been able to paint the concealed and to bring it to light."
A. Scemma
"Vinicius Pradella's fantastic realism is a complete view of the activity of this serious and linear artist, always faithful to topics rich in unpredictable solutions and just for that, difficult to dissect. The artist from Verona has a well-defined personality, refined thanks to the contact with the Brazilian beliefs and magic. Not by chance, talking about his art of painting, people use the name of "tantrism", a religion more than a philosophy. And the colour itself seems to come from the Amazon forests and natural environment: those various types of deep green, for example, or those different cobalt-blue that are in almost all the paintings by Pradella. A multiform artist, also engaged in the capillary spreading of the dictates of the style of his group, Pradella was able to find immediately an important place to his coming back home."
Gino Traversi
"The automatism by Vinicius Pradella, which springs from a previous environment definition, is one of the most sincere because, having no complex, it is free from any literary references. His effective chromatism perfectly sticks to the image, increasing its peculiarity. On the other side, in his white and black, meant as an harmonious sign weaving, the artist witnesses the most gentle and noble side of the tantric doctrine. His nudes just want to represent the becoming concrete of meanings which go beyond the natural datum to reach the spiritual world. So here he is, a complete and sincere surrealist whose language addresses the ego and the eye and the heart of man."