Giosetta Fioroni “Dreaming Day for Odilon” Monumental Work, Exhibited Rome 1984

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Giosetta Fioroni “Dreaming Day for Odilon” Monumental Symbolist Painting, Exhibited Rome 1984

A rare and fully documented monumental painting by … Read more Giosetta Fioroni “Dreaming Day for Odilon” Monumental Symbolist Painting, Exhibited Rome 1984

A rare and fully documented monumental painting by Giosetta Fioroni, titled Dreaming Day for Odilon, executed in 1984 and exhibited that same year at Galleria Giulia. This important canvas belongs to a poetic and conceptually rich moment in Fioroni’s oeuvre, engaging directly with the legacy of Odilon Redon and the broader Symbolist tradition.

Rather than a naturalistic still life, Fioroni’s floral composition emerges as an apparition—an image suspended between presence and memory. As articulated in the contemporaneous catalog essay by Anne-Marie Boetti, these flowers are “without innocence,” unfolding from a liminal space, their beauty at once lush and fragile, already on the verge of dissolution. The composition evokes a dreamlike logic: forms hover, soften, and dissolve beneath a luminous veil, achieved through layered washes and subtle tonal modulation.

The intellectual framework extends to Stéphane Mallarmé, whose notion of the “absent flower” resonates strongly within Fioroni’s anti-naturalistic approach. Here, the bouquet becomes a symbolic construct—an offering, a memory, and a meditation on painting itself—bridging Italian postwar sensibility with French Symbolist poetics.

Measuring 60 x 68 inches, this is a major exhibition-scale work. Its importance is underscored by exceptional documentation: the original 1984 gallery invoice confirms the title, medium (oil on canvas), and certifies the work as unique and entirely hand-painted by the artist. The painting was acquired directly from the exhibition by a New York collector, establishing an unbroken and transparent provenance.

Provenance:
Galleria Giulia, Rome; acquired from the above by a New York private collection, May 17, 1984; thence by descent.

Exhibited:
Rome, Galleria Giulia, Giosetta Fioroni, May–June 1984.

Literature:
Anne-Marie Boetti, “Dreaming day for Odilon,” exhibition catalog, Galleria Giulia, Rome, 1984.

English Translation

Dreaming day for Odilon — a day for dreaming, dreamed flowers, Fioroni dreaming… Redon’s poppies are not innocent (innocence remained with the roots in the meadow, in a healthy Impressionism). On their cut stems, they unfold their supreme, poignant beauty, already almost undone, and rise from limbo.
… what, then, does Fioroni dream? She dreams that “delicious unease,” that scent of sacrifice, that perfume of Fleurs du mal, for her it becomes an invitation to magical nuptials. As a graceful priestess she retraces gestures, recomposes the bouquet with scrupulous and perverse fidelity—even squaring the paper itself.

… Fioroni dreams of art in general, which is always an exercise upon a repertoire and at the same time a practice of one’s own freedom, and nevertheless a risk within the “vagueness of the unresolved” (as Redon said), which she perhaps expresses in the white veil spread over radiant colors.

… Fioroni dreams of Mallarmé, Redon’s friend, he too a devotee of the anti-naturalistic flower—“hosanna of the garden of our limbo,” absolute flower, “the absent one from every bouquet.”

Anne-Marie Boetti

A compelling opportunity to acquire a large-scale, exhibition-documented work by one of Italy’s most poetic postwar voices, situated at the intersection of memory, symbolism, and painterly reverie. See less