In Matilde Izzia's work, completeness arrives through total identification with her subjects—humble, uncompromising, whole. Each painting feels like a discovery, invention made continuous, clarity without distortion.
The original emotion becomes a driving force, and our eyes—effortlessly—recognize what lives inside these images. Call it validity, call it meaning: this is what art has always offered, and what we never stop asking for.
The Artist
Matilde Izzia di Ricaldone (1931–2005) was born in Casale Monferrato. She graduated from the Accademia Albertina in Turin in 1949 and won the chair of Drawing at Italian Higher Institutes. In her youth she painted frescoes and decorative panels in churches and theatres across Piedmont, Liguria, and Lombardy. Commissioned by the Superintendency of Piedmont's Art Galleries, she organized the exhibition of the Eucharistic Congress at Palazzo Chiablese in Turin. She began her artistic research in the tradition of the "Six Painters of Turin," studying under masters Menzio, Capra, and Carrà, before breaking away to pursue further experiments essential to her own pictorial formation.
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She exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad, including: Galleria d'Arte Fogliato, Turin, 1968; Galerie Motte, Geneva, 1970; Galleria Hilton, Turin, 1971; Cà Vendramin Calergi, Venice, 1985 (alongside artists such as Casorati, Savinio, Paolucci, Carena, Grosso, and others)—before withdrawing to her solitary villa in the Monferrato hills, where she devoted herself to study, research, and an abundant production of oil paintings and drawings, organized into various cycles.
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More attentive to the internal logic of her art than to external influences of trends or the market, she brought forth—with refined sensibility, keen intelligence, and assured technique—essential and evocative still lifes, and highly effective, vigorous figures, with a precise sense of color and movement. Her work received favoUrable critical appreciation from:
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Oscar Ghez — Collector and philanthropist; President of the Petit Palais Museum, Geneva
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Noemi Gabrielli — Art historian; Superintendent of the Art Galleries of Piedmont
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Marziano Bernardi — Leading Italian art critic and journalist at La Stampa
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Giovanni Viarengo — Art critic; President of the Promotrice di Belle Arti, Turin; former Director General of RAI TV
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Giovanna Barbero — Art critic and member of A.I.C.A. (International Association of Art Critics)
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Aldo Passoni — Director of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Turin
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Angelo Mistrangelo — Art critic at La Stampa, prominent voice in the Piedmontese art world
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A. Minucci — Art critic at La Stampa
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Vittorio Sgarbi - art critic
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Carlo Navone — Journalist and art critic
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Vittorio Bottino — Journalist and art critic
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Albino Galvano — Turin-based painter, theorist, and critic; a key figure in Italian abstract art and the cultural life of postwar Piedmont
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A. Peillez — Art critic
Her works are held in Italian and international collections and are catalogued in Museums, Galleries, and Academies across Europe.
Catalogues:
A. di Ricaldone, Matilde Izzia di Ricaldone, Casale Monferrato, 1983;
G. Barbero, Piemonte anni 80 pittura e scultura, Milan, 1985;
A. De Marchi, Izzia, Vercelli, 1991;
C. Prete, A rebours, Casale Monferrato, 2013.
Posthumous exhibitions:
Retrospettiva, Mede Lomellina, 2006;
A rebours, Castello di Casale Monferrato, 2013; Matilde Izzia, Complesso Monumentale di Santa Croce, Alessandria, 2014.
Donna Donne, pittura al femminile, Museo Civico di Moncalvo, Monferrato 2016
PERIODS
1950 – 1960
STUDY of ANCIENT TECHNIQUES
Coloristic explorations of various early 20th-century schools: during this period, she also attends the studio of a talented student of Bistolfi, who guides her toward large-scale symbolic composition. The painter produces busts, portraits, and sketches during this time, but she feels a stronger pull toward color. She prefers to reinterpret pictorial works in a modern key, already revealing a tendency to seek a rhythmic balance between fullness and emptiness, light and space.
1960 – 1970
POST-IMPRESSIONIST and EXPRESSIONIST experiences
There emerges immediately the pursuit of broad, expansive compositions enriched by strong tonal values. What stands out is the artist’s deliberate choice to reintroduce the universal human figure as a central element in her work.
1970 – 1982
Compositional CLARIFICATION via Thematic ABSTRACTION
The figure and the object discover a new space of their own, anchoring themselves within compositional lines that transcend reality. The more refined use of color enhances the expressive power of the drawing, and the work emerges as a distilled essence of fully matured meaning. In 1968, the painter presented herself to critics and the public with her first solo exhibition of 56 paintings, held in Turin at the Galleria d’Arte Fogliato.
The critic P.A. Tibaldeschi writes:
The Artist and the Subtle Forces of Perception
The formal fertility of our time is as striking as it is superficial. Its appeal may be immediate, but just as immediate is its exhaustion—because this so-called fertility depends more on appearance than on essence. It is not sufficiently internalized at its origin, nor is it capable of being deeply internalized by those who experience it.
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Matilde Izzia, on the other hand, reminds us that form is a tool of artistic creation, not its goal—just as tone, color, and line are tools. Guided by this conviction, her works free themselves from superficial indulgences, from distractions offered by facile philosophies—whether formal, graphic, or chromatic.
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What we find instead is the constant presence of the artist herself: the genuine persistence of her emotional truth. It is this emotional presence that shapes the dynamic development of her compositions, the chromatic notations, the placement of masses within space.
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On the canvas, Matilde Izzia draws together—simultaneously and seamlessly—content, expressive intuition, technical foundation, and a deep sense of naturalistic abstraction.
Each subject aspires toward universality within the individual and individuality within the universal. And while that may sound like a simple play on words, it is, in truth, one of the great constants of that enduring endeavour we call art.
