Terra Rossa

In the collective imagination, grass is the paradise of tennis — a stage where grace, elegance, and lightness are on display — while clay courts are an arena of penance, where the game becomes a struggle marked by effort, sweat, and often torment.

Velasco Vitali’s work dedicated to the world of tennis began in 2017, when the artist rented a new studio featuring a greenhouse and an actual tennis court. This court became a source of inspiration for his paintings titled Square or Court: rigorously monochromatic compositions in shades of red, which were also described by Gianni Clerici in his book Il Tennis nell’Arte (Mondadori, 2018).

In subsequent years, the painting series expanded under a new title: Terra Rossa (Red Clay), a reference to Красный квадрат (Red Square), one of Kazimir Malevich’s most iconic works.

With this exhibition, Vitali activates a new imaginative state, embarking on a journey through painting that shifts focus to the soft, crumbling texture of color and the dusty nature of red ochre. The compositions evoke fragments or angular cuts of tennis courts, with broad monochromatic fields redefined by the geometries of white lines, which reshape the context. Painting thus becomes a tool to spark imagination, with color serving as a metaphor for both art and sport.

Terra Rossa offers a key to interpretation, encouraging reflection on the power of images in the contemporary era and inspiring new visions rooted in this earthy hue. The red clay transforms the tennis court into an archetypal dimension: in these works, color is distilled to its essence, tasked with narrating or imagining, engaging solely with the material that composes it.