"L'Eroico" Lorenzo Viani

The development of the expressionistic language adopted by Lorenzo Viani took place equally in two fields of artistic practice that the artist from Viareggio constantly explored through his career: painting and wood engraving. For Viani wood engraving represented a privileged testing ground for his poetics, especially thanks to the innate roughness of the medium, which managed to perfectly satisfy the rigidity and "irregularity" peculiar to the Fauvist-Expressionist style of the artist in the first decades of the 19th century. Important examples of this creative process can be found in his artworks made between 1914-1916 for "L'Eroica," the art and literature journal founded by Ettore Cozzani (1884 1971) in La Spezia in 1911 that soon became the meeting and promotion point of the most important contemporary wood engraving in Italy. With his wood engravings published by "L'Eroica," Viani contributed to the so-called "Xylography Secession," namely the migration of a fierce group of young artists of the "worn out" and trite Art Nouveau style towards a more modern language enriched by neo-primitivism trends in line with the movement that was gaining ground in the rest of Europe, particularly in France and Germany. [Revised Publication Abstract]