VIII° CONCORSO LA FENICE ET DES ARTISTES ANNO 2007

Hotel La Fenice et des Artistes: my home in Venice

When I walked into the halls of Hotel la Fenice et des Artistes for the first time, I felt like I was surrounded be a live, modern collection put together by art lovers who take pleasure in buying works they love and who want to make their guests relish and appreciate them. This feeling was then confirmed in the writings of the artists who had passed through those halls; the intimacy, the pleasure of sitting in a house’s living room surrounded by works that one can often admire only in museums is one of the dominant themes of the book by the hotel’s guests.

That is what I wrote eight years ago when I timidly introduced the first edition of the Fenice et des Artistes
award and tried to seize the warmth and friendliness of the family that runs the hotel.

As the years have gone by, my friendship with Michele has become stronger – despite my excesses – and I can
personally state that thanks to him and his family, one can truly feel at home in this hotel.

Last year, when I spoke at the event’s opening, I emphasised that a “salon des artistes” is forming around the hotel and award, a true artistic coterie in which everyone together, and in groups of friends, gets together to “laze about” in order to regenerate their minds at least once a year.

The hotel has become the Venetian home of many artists. Whoever takes part even just one time in the events
organised by the ownership knows he or she can return when they want as guests of the Facchini family.

Many artists have already experienced the most bazaar forms of “barter”, but each of them knows that what lies at the source of everything is the friendship that has formed with our host.

We have been in Amsterdam and Trieste, and we have found the same warm reception. Michele is a great, though absolutely atypical, patron. He does not try to secure an artist’s production. First of all, he wants to
receive and bestow friendship.

I believe the same principle counts with regard to myself. I think that if our relationship was merely economic, even if there was an enormous return, the award would not be so successful.

It is in order to pay homage to the sense of friendship that Michele places before everything else that prompted me this year to propose the theme “Hotel la Fenice et des Artistes: My Home in Venice”.

When artists stay at the Hotel La Fenice et des Artistes, they feel right at home in their Venice residence, welcomed in a way one cannot even imagine unless he or she has experienced it. Michele is the one who wants it that way. His quiet though generous friendship grazes us and involves us. He wants that this coterie of artists to become more and more vital, so this year we are celebrating that place and that spirit!
The desire is to express that sense of warmth that Michele, with his friendship and placing at our disposal that “old Venetian sweater”, has been trying to create for eight years with the Fenice et des Artistes award.

Bergamo, Panta Rei, the first day of Spring 2007
Giacomo Pellegrini

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