Albino Lucatello (1927–1984) was one of the most important Venetian painters of the post–war period (see biography). His paintings can be divided into two main periods which were inspired by the regions where he lived: Venice and Friuli.
As a young man, after a series of impressionist paintings of the Venetian lagoon, Lucatello started an intense period of sketches. He drew coalmen, rice–weeders, emarginated people, and many female figures that are strictly part of the neo–realist genre. Then he painted The roof-tops, the vegetable gardens, the deltas and at the same time exhibited his work. He won the Tursi prize at the Biennale and even signed a contract with an American gallery. He organised personal exhibitions and participated in collective exhibitions in the USA and in all of the main European countries.
The second period started in 1962 when he moved Friuli. Regardless of the fact that he brought with him the colours and the wide brush stokes from the Venetian tradition — and his dominant personality — it was as if he had been reborn. In Friuli Lucatello continued to be a realist artist, even in his original conception of the term, and found the subject matter suitable to his character: a rough, dry, essential earth, in which it is nonetheless possible to gather infinite lyric and passionate variants. His “periods” follow on from each other from the Tagliamenti to the Earths, Sunsets, Suns, Obstacles, and Countrysides of Friuli until the Musi (the mountains around Tarcento, where he lived) that were interrupted by his untimely death.
In Venice Lucatello had become significantly well–known, but in Friuli, even though he participated in the region’s cultural life, he chose to live on the edges of the artistic history of the time.

translated by Rebecca N. Kay