Over the last 30 years, Courtauld Institute alumni Emmanuel Moatti has owned and run galleries in London, Paris and New York, specialising in recovering once lost old masters. His new gallery, Moatti Masters | Contemporary on London’s ever tonier Mount Street, has a different if complementary angle; exhibiting contemporary artists with old master skill sets, or as the gallery has it ’fine artists who draw inspiration from the art-historical language to create a new modernity.’
Its inaugural show features the remarkable cloudscapes of Italian artist Alberto Bertoldi. Born in 1955 in Turin, Bertoldi developed a passion for the great North European landscape painters and set about painting in the grand landscape tradition. By the early 1990s his gaze had drifted skywards; always working outdoors, he began to paint his super-realistic studies in the light and fluffy forms of clouds, his sharp cropping and framing adding a fresh compositional charge.
Moatti, meanwhile, hasn’t given up on the old masters and will continue to research, unearth and show works from the 16th century onwards, as well as putting together a programme of new painters embracing more anachronistic ways of working (next up is Chinese artist Xie Xiaoze).
