For the first time in Italy, the collection of 243 oils on panel that painter André Quellier has dedicated to the famous fables of Jean de La Fontaine.
The exhibition, an immersion into the heart of the many imaginaries stratified in the history of the fable starting with Aesop and Phaedrus, is a journey of knowledge and fascination, in which the fable, with its ancestral and imaginative symbolism, reveals the stories, vices and virtues of humanity in an incisive and immediate way.
With the collection of works by André Quellier, the Casa degli Artisti crosses local and national borders for a tribute to the arts that spans several epochs and honours several languages: from the words of the writer Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695) to the illustrations of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) to the colour plates of André Quellier (1925-2010).
A true pictorial challenge, the one undertaken by André Quellier since 1991: six years of work for the pictorial transposition of La Fontaine's 243 fairy tales, inspired by the illustrations of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a painter at the court of King Louis XV who created the illustrations in the early 1730s with brush and black ink.
What is striking about Jean de La Fontaine's fairy tales today is their ability, almost four centuries later and despite the fact that the undisputed protagonists are animals, to speak to us about ourselves, our world and our times, revealing how man's innermost nature remains essentially the same over the centuries, marked by opportunism, selfishness and pettiness. A moral message that the author dispenses lightly and with an irony that at times verges on sarcasm.
The exhibition in Italy, at the Casa degli Artisti, is realised thanks to the collaboration with the painter's daughter Isabelle Quellier, who, together with her sister Arianne, keeps the archive. A family that has been practising the arts for generations and has always maintained a bridge with Trentino. The exhibition project, one year after the centenary of André Quellier's birth, is realised in collaboration with the association Manifestazioni Rivane, which organises the famous Fairy Tale Night in Riva del Garda at the end of summer.
