Sareo street festival is an annual art event in Schio, when local artists present their works in a public exhibition held on Via Pasubio in the city centre. Since, the old name of this street was Via Sareo, so that gives it the name.
The painting below is a portrait by Moreno Greselin titled "Serenity and Understanding". I like the amused turn of lips and the twinkling eyes of the lady. Click on the images for a bigger view of the artworks.
Like every year, I want to present the art works that I liked in this years' exhibition - here are the 10 artworks that I liked most this time.
Some Specific Issues with This Years' Exhibition
This year, in 2026, the event was held on the last weekend of June, but not in the street. Instead it was held in the Shed hall, the old building of Conte Wool Mills, used for cultural events.
It was supposed to be the weekend to celebrate the festival of Schio's patron saint, St. Peters, but all the public celebrations were cancelled because of an accident which claimed the lives of 2 persons from the local Salesian school, a young priest (Don Francesco) and a student (Alberto).
The Sareo 2026 art festival was not cancelled but it remained inside the Shed hall. Since, this weekend was especially hot, with temperatures going up to 36° C, it may not have been easy, any way, to organise it in the open street.
12 Artists & Their Artworks from Sereo 2026
The artists are not presented in any specific order of importance or quality of their artworks.
(1) Let me start with a painting by Giuseppe Fochesato. He paints old abandoned rooms and buildings, where you can see peeling paint, dusty surfaces, a feeling as the time has stopped, and shafts of light illuminating them. In this particular work that I have chosen for this post, I love the shades of purple in the walls, the orange in the old sofa and the blue in the windows. The painting was titled "Blue windows". I also love the feeling of dust and light, the glass left on the table and a sense of frozen time, as if someone went out and never came back.
I met Giuseppe at the exhibition and I am planning to interview him for this blog, after the end of the summer.
(2) The second artwork that I really liked, is by Lanfranco dalle Carbonare. It is titled "From above" and has an abstract look, mainly in blues with a touch of red. It makes me think of a histology slide stained by methylene blue or the colours used for acid-fast bacilli. It is a drone's eye-view of a landscape, a kind of Google map, which he turns into abstract lines and shades.
(3) The third is a landscape by Mauro Marzari. I had interviewed him sometime ago. I like the way he uses colours, mixing together forms and abstraction. The orange background of this artwork, titled "Landscape", gives an idea of a forest fire and yet the white silhouette of the tree in the foreground gives me a feeling of coolness and mitigates the orange heat.
(4) The Cathedral by Luigia Meneguzzo is simple and evocative mixed materials artwork using the bark of a tree. Probably, I am influenced by the images of the inauguration of the Sagrada Familia church in Barcellona a few days ago, but the bark of the tree used by Luigia with a little colour reminded me of that. I thought that it was clever and effective. All of us have the experience of seeing faces or figures in clouds and in random surfaces. Luigia saw a bark and saw a cathedral in it.
(5) Antonia Bortoloso makes very femminine and delicate artworks, with pastel colours and diaphanous laces and taffeta skirts. This time she had two artworks in the exhibition and I liked this one, titled Empty Space, more because of the bird sitting on the hand of the woman lost in thoughts in the painting. That bird somehow reminded me of the well-known Indian artist B. Prabha, who often painted women with birds.
(6) The artist Ercole Lino Bettiale had a few artworks in the exhibition, among them a round-shaped fantasy landscape of an old city quarter. However, I liked his "The Chess" more because the figures in it, the queen and the knight alongside the background of a chess-board, seem to be laughing at a private joke.
This painting also reminded me somehow the Netflix series about chess, titled Queen's Gambit.
(7) Luigi Bernardi, originally from Schio and now based in Malo, started his artistic journey in 1977 and makes abstract compositions, using dark and spent colours that seem to merge into each other in a soft background, where you can, if one so wishes, see all kinds of figures and shapes, as in a psychologists' Rorschach test. They reminded me of walls that often come out when you scratch the paints and whitewashes covering them.
(8) Mario de Poli's abstract composition, titled "Light and the Tower" was similar to Luigi Bernardi, but a little more structured, mostly in the shades of green with a touch of orange. In an interview I have read that Luigi Bernardi and Mario de Poli (from Padova) had started their artistic journey together. Perhaps that explains the affinities in their approach to abstract art. However, in his long carrier as an artist, he has experimented with different styles.
(9) Flaviana de Marchi's "Full Stop" with its reds and pinks, made me think of the hot summer afternoons with an angry red sun and someone angrily and furiously strumming on a guitar. I think that it would the right painting to look at on a morning when I am feeling sleepy and need to wake up!
(10) The next artwork that I have chosen for my list is of a baby boy, holding a bunch of grapes and his eyes full of tears. It is by Moreno Greselin and was titled, "Boy grapes crying". I like it for the boy's expression and for the colour combination of blue and yellow, which always reminds me of Van Gogh.
(11) Gian Battista Clementi is known for his landscapes, especially from the Leogra valley. Often, I can recognise the house he paints because they are from Sant'Antonio or Valle del Pasubio, a few kilometres north of Schio. For example, this year, I think that the two paintings he presented were both of the corner houses at the bridge in Gisbenti on Via dell'Acqua, a mountain hiking path that I love. His paintings had two versions of this place, one in the spring and the other with the winter snow. I liked more the one with the snow, which is presented below.
I am hoping to interview Clementi this year.
(12) The last painting that I have selected for this year is a small artwork, a pencil drawing of a young woman with tears in her eyes by Zohra Aljabbari. I am not sure if I have seen any of her works earlier and from her name she is an immigrant. So I am happy to include a new artist's name in my list. Her work was framed and covered with glass, but fortunately it was in a shadowed area, so I could take a picture of it without too much reflex.
In The End
Some of the artworks in this exhibition were framed and covered with glass, and I am unable to include them in my list. This was because of the strong morning light in the Shed hall, when I visited the exhibition, since it created strong reflections on the glass, so I was unable to look at them properly and to take their pictures.
Over the last few years, I have been going to different art exhibitions in Schio and writing about them in my blog. This means that I have started recognising their names and recognising their art-styles. The moment I see their art work, I can tell who is the artist. This gives me pleasure.
I have also interviewed some of them and this year, I am planning to interview two of them, Fochesato and Clementi. While some of them have Facebook and Instagram pages, but some of them are almost invisible on internet. They are the ones, I want to interview and present in this blog.
Finally, you can also check my post about Sareo 2025.
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