Three protagonists of Venetian Spatialism, united by a deep friendship and by an unrepeatable season of Italian post-war art, return to dialogue in an exhibition celebrating their creative strength and mutual influence. From December 19, 2025, to February 1, 2026, the MANN - National Archaeological Museum of Naples hosts the exhibition "Riccardo Licata, Gino Morandis, and Tancredi Parmeggiani. Stories of art and friendship," curated by Giovanni Granzotto, with the co-curation of Giordano Bruno Guerri and organized by Il Cigno in collaboration with Studio d’Arte GR.

The exhibition stems from the human and artistic bond that united Licata, Morandis, and Tancredi since their youth, when they shared studios, experiences, and reflections on the new frontiers of painting, participating in the Spatialist movements and sometimes signing their manifestos. An emblematic example of this closeness is the portrait of Licata created by Tancredi - a rare and significant work that testifies to the intensity of their relationship.

The exhibition features over seventy works, approximately twenty-five for each Master, and traces their creative journey from the second post-war period until the mid-1960s: a period in which their research intertwined most, tragically ending with Tancredi's death. For Licata and Morandis, the journey continues into the following decades, showing the evolution of their artistic languages.

The exhibition path includes Riccardo Licata's early Spatialist experiments, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, all shaped by his urgency to combine the natural "space" with the absolute space of history, particularly ancient history, and the subsequent development of his "magical alphabet," a pictorial writing suspended between sign and light. The color tiles that build his surfaces ideally refer to Byzantine mosaics, a source of inspiration for the artist, who captured their luminous vibration and ancient spirituality to transpose it into a contemporary key.

The beginning of Gino Morandis' artistic trajectory is represented by the tempera paintings from 1948-50, witnessing the first Spatialist experiments that combined light and color in a lyrical and visionary dimension, then continuing with the chromatic fields of the following years, where atomic and sidereal suggestions coexist. The "atom" for Morandis is not only a symbol of scientific modernity but also a reference to the primordial elements of nature, to the original substance that underlies both science and ancient mythology.