This work entered the Cariplo Collection from a private collection in 1991. The painting datable to the end of the 1980s depicts a view of Venice with the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute.

Having escaped from a German prison, from 1944 Remo Brindisi lived in hiding in Venice where he became a friend and professional associate of Carlo Cardazzo, owner of the Galleria del Cavallino. In the immediate postwar years he began an intense research on the theme of landscape with a series of views of the lagoon. His early works are distinguished by a geometric synthesis of forms and the use of broad fields of light bright colour, which was followed during the 1950s by a new pictorial handling consisting of broad rapid brushstrokes, similar in style to Art Informel.

From the following decade on, the artist began to show a marked preference for the same subjects in his Venetian landscapes: St Mark’s Basin, the Rialto Bridge, the island of San Giorgio and especially the church of Santa Maria della Salute. These typical tourist sites of the city become a mere pretext for experimenting with colour, which is applied in broad, flat, bright fields and with composition, the framing of which suggests the influence of photography. What results is a fantastical vision of the city, which becomes flattened in a two-dimensional space that was to become the hallmark of his subsequent production until his maturity.

This and another view of Venice in the Collection are part of Brindisi’s late production that is marked by a certain repetition of themes and a sometimes hasty execution. Here the artist exploits the church and the fragment of architecture in the extreme foreground to frame the broad sheet of water of the canal that takes up the entire visual space as far as the upper edge of the painting. The Baroque shapes of the church are accentuated – the domes become larger and the volutes of the buttresses turn into curls – in order to create a decorative and fantastical effect, to which the vivid colour contrast of blue and orange with a few touches of white and black contributes.