Ivana Spinelli, Fabrizio Corneli, Vittoria Biasi and Rita Mele before Corneli’s work at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre on Sunday. Picture by Biswarup Dutta

A major exhibition of 12 leading Italian artists will be inaugurated at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre on Ho Chi Minh Sarani, opposite the American consulate-general’s office, on Wednesday in the presence of H.E. Armellini, the ambassador of Italy in India.

Titled Springs in White and curated by Vittoria Biasi, professor of contemporary art at the Fine Arts Academy of Florence, it is part of the policy to promote the Italian system as a whole in West Bengal, says Bruno Campria, the Italian consul general in Calcutta.

This is part of a continuing endeavour to woo as India as a trade partner that began a few years ago with the smashing exhibition celebrating 50 years of Italian fashion at the Victoria Memorial Hall, followed by an exhibition where the contemporary art of India and Italy confronted each other at the same venue.

Three of the participating artists — Ivana Spinelli, Rita Mele and Fabrizio Corneli — and curator Biasi are here to install the art works at this culture centre whose ceiling is too low for proper display.

On Sunday afternoon, only Corneli’s light-and-shadow work was displayed. Biasi, translated by Bruno Campria, explained how the Springs in White project, organised by the consulate general of Italy in Calcutta and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, happened.

The project was specially conceived for India and the artists and the curator were discovering a common approach in the two cultures to the concept of white. “The research focused not on form but rather on thoughts. If we wish to deal with other countries and cultures we discover that we are dealing with philosophical concepts and not merely aesthetic forms. We tried to discover and to emphasise the poetry of paintings,” explained Biasi.

In Italy since the 1960s important artists focussed on the concept of white. This project was founded on two main guidelines — the historical point of view centred on evolutions of the concept of white in art languages, and the second was rather poetic — emotional.

Corneli said his work underlined the difficulty to read images. “Flowers are born white. My works become black,” said Ivana Spinelli, whose drawings focus on the dark side of human life. Rita Mele said her work was based on the idea of the magic space around the totem and the recovery of ancient rituals.