Artist: Nicola Simbari

Nicola Simbari’s paintings are celebrations of light, color, and the exuberant rhythms of Mediterranean life. La Dolce Vita gathers a selection of his most luminous canvases — seaside promenades, café scenes, sun-drenched terraces and quick, vivacious figure studies — all painted with the bravura of his signature palette-knife technique. The works on view transform quotidian moments into theatrical tableaux: sun, shadow, and architecture become chromatic instruments that sing together.

Born in Calabria in 1927 and trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Simbari brought a hybrid sensibility to his art: an architect’s respect for structure combined with an impressionist’s devotion to sensation. Over the course of his career, he moved fluidly between approaches — from geometric constructions to near-abstract color fields — yet always returned to figurative subjects and Mediterranean motifs. His training and background shaped the compositional rigor beneath the flamboyant surfaces: blocks of color often read as both built form and atmospheric light.

Simbari’s palette-knife handling is central to the works in this exhibition. Thick, slashed strokes create planes of impasto that catch and reflect light, giving each painting an architecture of color. This technique enables Simbari to achieve both immediacy and monumentality: a casual gesture becomes a defining ridge, and a fleeting glance is captured in an enduring arc of paint. The result is imagery that reads at once as memory and performance — as if each canvas were a brightly notated entry in a visual diary.

La Dolce Vita frames Simbari as a chronicler of pleasure without sentimentality. The artist’s figures rarely stare out at us; they inhabit the picture with the private assurance of a life lived fully in daylight. Boats, terraces, and flowering hedges recur as props in scenes of ease and sociability, while color provides the emotional commentary. Where a photograph would fix a single instant, Simbari’s brush (and knife) accumulates experience: the eye reads multiple temporalities at once — the present shimmer, the echo of past and the promise of more to come.

Findlay Galleries has championed Simbari’s work, which has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe for many years; this presentation continues that tradition, drawing together paintings that illustrate his formal versatility and his enduring passion for Mediterranean subject matter. Whether rendered as a small, jewel-like panel or as a sweeping canvas, each painting in La Dolce Vita invites the viewer into a world where color is both language and landscape.