Italian Pavilion – The curators: Luca Beatrice and Beatrice Buscaroli. In the new Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale, the “Collaudi” exhibition is being held, homage to F.T. Marinetti, curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice. Various factors underlie the choices made by the curators starting with the reasoning upon which the selection itself was based: “Not a simple selection of artists but a true exhibition responding to a specific theme, to a concept. The starting point”, continue the curators, “was the homage to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who is the tutelary numen of Collaudi. It is the vitality in the present that interests us about Futurism, the first and only Italian avant-garde movement of the 20th century. A movement open to the co-existence of all the languages, from the historic ones, such as painting and sculpture, to the experimentation of art films, photography, performance and unusual materials. This vision without pre-constituted barriers is exactly what we have sought to adopt, paying close attention to the works – designed and produced for the occasion.” conclude Beatrice e Buscaroli, “ Our survey has concentrated above all on the 40-45-year-olds, adding some younger artists and other masters representing visual and cultural points of reference.”
Italian Pavilion – Sissi. La Deriva Il Nodo Della Mia Gola, enamel ceramics and iron reinforcing rod, 2009. Sissi seems to be swept away by an oceanic feeling that leads her to lose herself in chthonic nature in order to be able to flow back into it. This is a primitive instinct to return to the origins, to identify with the breath of the universe. Hence the importance she gives to the materials that in her work become prostheses of her limbs, an extension of her organism.
Italian Pavilion – Giacomo Costa. Private garden, 24 lightboxes installation, 2009. Night and day, vegetation and city ruins mingle in stifling atmospheres inhabited by sinister lights and the archaeology of a humanity only remembered through its technological decadence. Nature is back in its rightful place as legitimate mistress and vital component capable of rebirth and rising above the state of things.
Italian Pavilion – Nicola Verlato. The Beauty of Failure, oil on canvas, 2009. Nicola Verlato’s version of this Baroque style is decidedly contemporary, however, as he applies it to themes and context with which he feels an affinity, like rock music, skateboarding, and cartoons. The result is an art that is a cross between Altdorfer, Pop Art, manga, and heavy metal, in a visual arsenal of allusions that blend high culture and low culture.
Seen in the Italian Pavilion. Nicola Verlato and his sculpture The Gift, bronze, brass and marble, 2009.
Italian Pavilion – Bertozzi & Casoni. Composizione Non Finita – Infinita, polychrome ceramic, 2009. Ceramics became Bertozzi and Casoni’s material of choice, and they would never stray from it: it allowed them to shift back and forth between tradition and innovation, dismissing, often with a sizable dose of irony, all the prejudices and conformism that surrounded the applied arts in the art world. In place of a traditional artist’s studio, they preferred a factory, where they experimented with technique with their characteristic rigor and concision, in order to rethink the medium of painted ceramic sculpture.
Contessanally tip: click on the photo to enlarge it.
Italian Pavilion – Bertozzi & Casoni. A detail of Bertozzi and Casoni’s Composizione Non Finita –Infinita, polychrome ceramic, 2009.
Photograph courtesy Sergio alfredini
Italian Pavilion – Nicolo Bolla. Orpheus’s Dream, set crystals on iron mesh, 2009. Bolla’s Wunderkammern – from the German “cabinet of wonders,” the characteristics form that private collections and museums took towards the end of the Enlightenment – are made up of mirabilia, extraordinary objects both natural and artificial, that lend themselves to symbolic interpretations. Thought must dominate the work, and the construction of reality must be replaced by the dream imagination.
Seen in the Italian Pavilion. Nicolo Bolla.
photograph courtesy La Biennale
Italian Pavilion – MASBEDO. Schegge d' incanto in fondo al dubbio, 2009, video-installation on two back light screen, cm 225x400 - with Sonia Bergamasco and Ramon Tarès. Directors of staging whose cool colors clash and sturate the scene, MASBEDO or Nicolo Massazza and Jacopo Bedogni place man at the center-stage, with his nature both rational and irrational, and all his baggage existential contradiction that have been the foundation of Western Philosophy over the last two centuries: anxiety, fears, limitations, barriers, solitude and incommunicability. The frames of the artists’ epic narratives are the theatre of platonic dualism – male and female – which seeks the solution to its malaise in struggle and in the resistance against a reality that is nothing but an illusion.
Seen in the Italian Pavilion. MASBEDO or Nicolo Massazza and Jacopo Bedogni
Italian Pavilion – Daniele Galliano. Daniele Galliano’s paintings are animated by natural light and in some cases reflect the sunny alpine atmosphere of Giovanni Segantini’s pictures. Man, however, is present and establishes a dialogue with the landscape that seems simply to host him: he is no longer a central detail; he doesn’t blend with the environment but seeks to coexist with it.
Italian Pavilion – Daniele Galliano. Hic et Nunc, oil painting on canvas, 2009.
Italian Pavilion – Sandro Chia. For Sandro Chia the painterly act is an individual fact that cannot be circumscribed by definitions of any kind, since it is not hampered by the obstacles of theme and content. Thirty years after Transavanguardia the artist still possesses the power and charisma that he translated into a sign that is unique, far-removed from fashions and the risk of imitation.