The exhibition called ANTONIO CANOVA is taking place at the Antonio Canova Gypsotheca Museum. HIDDEN PORTRAITS, inaugurated on Tuesday 13 December 2022, which will end on 30 April 2023. I presented the project for this exhibition to the Canova Foundation, which was accepted by Professor Vittorio Sgarbi, President, who invited me to implement it and whom I thank together with the Dr. Mascotto, Director of the Museum.

It is an exhibition that presents unpublished portraits of Canova taken from paintings made to him by painters known in his time that have come down to us, including two self-portraits by the same sculptor. The images that I present in my project are portraits made through a virtual translation. It is capable of modifying the human expressions represented, into new and different ones. If such a result can be obtained from a photograph, a similar effect can also be obtained from a painting, and so it was. I made a series of new portraits of Canova that did not exist up to now, which are truthful because they present the sculptor's face as highly probable, a true image of the artist in the vision of whoever portrayed him.

They present themselves as other portraits that were hidden in the paintings of the time, and today they have manifested themselves after two hundred years, waiting for someone to find them, thus giving new life to Canova. An animation was also produced, a short video, which enriches the works to complete the exhibition, and even better manifests the conceptual research combined with the inevitable artistic value. This research also gave space to make a narration of it. In an ideal meeting, I asked Canova to pose for me and show himself after so many years of absence. I had to entice him quite a bit by telling him that coming back to life would be an opportunity to also show other aspects of himself, which each portrait reveals. Fifty new portraits are fifty new aspects, impressions, suggestions, questions. In a bicentenary from his death, bringing the Sculptor back to life through new portraits to which he willingly lent himself was a very demanding undertaking that required many months of work. In this common effort my friend showed no weariness or impatience.

It was a pleasure to work with him, he was never tired, while I was sometimes exhausted or dying of heat. He spoke only with his eyes but he made himself understood very well, like his disagreements for unsuccessful expressions that I promptly discarded. However in this work all the most beautiful expressions have been captured in these new portraits. Some of them are a bit disturbing, and perhaps even more so are the animated passages, but all this fits into the theme of death and life found.