Ettore Spalletti

Spalletti's canvases and panels are built up in layers of powdered pigment mixed into gesso, applied as a fragile, homogeneous impasto. The resulting surfaces are so delicate that the slightest touch can alter them. His palette runs to pale azure, sage green, lavender, and salmon, not chosen arbitrarily but drawn from the specific tonal quality of the Abruzzo sky and mountain light. The forms are simple: columns, amphoras, ovoid vessels, circles. The effect is not minimalism in any cold sense but something closer to devotion.

He exhibited at Documenta in both 1982 and 1992, and in 1997 represented Italy at the Venice Biennale. An early pairing with Haim Steinbach at the Guggenheim Museum's *Osmosis* exhibition in 1992 drew attention to the conceptual underpinnings of work that could otherwise read as purely aesthetic. A well-known photograph from 1981 shows Spalletti holding a ceramic vase, cropped so that his arm appears as a column, a typical blurring of the boundary between the body and the object.

Spalletti is associated with Arte Povera and its broader Italian lineage, though his work is quieter than much of that movement. He died in 2019, having rarely left Cappelle sul Tavo, a consistency that says something about both the man and the practice.