Graham Sutherland, «Untitled», 1977
Courtesy of Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m.., Bologna | Paris | Venice
Two exhibitions promoted by the Calarota Foundation, created in 2019 by Franco and Roberta Calarota with the aim of creating cultural bridges through art, are hosted until July 27 on the two main floors of the foundation's exhibition venue, Palazzo Franchetti in Venice. «Objects and Things think in silence», curated by Roberta Perazzini Calarota, is dedicated to Mattia Moreni (Pavia, 1920-Brisighella, Ravenna, 1999), with a selection of more than 30 works, many of which are large, which mark the most important points of his work, «to build a small anthology», explains the curator. After his early work in the 1950s, when he was linked to the Group of Eight, he moved on to the informal period, with a major work, among others: «A tutti i maldestri del mondo: Amitié» from 1960, presented at the Venice Biennale that year, which marked the beginning of the integration between painting and writing that would become one of Moreni's stylistic features. About this work, Michel Tapié wrote in the catalogue of the event: «Far from the useless academicisms that lie in wait even for the most daring, Moreni lives intensely, totally, what is, for him, the pictorial adventure; and never was the term adventure more pertinent. His work questions, and thus places itself to an effective test, at the only possible level of the current human condition». Moreni would also return to the Venice Biennale with a personal room in 1972 and with the series of «Angurie». With the cycle of «Umanoidi», the exhibition reaches the last phase of his production, with his accents of «prophet Cassandra with destabilizing invectives, this lyrical Totò with devastating humor, this Dantesque Michelangelo dispossessed of His Sistine Chapel», as Emanuel Daydé wrote. "Since the 1980s, the artist had begun with great lucidity and intuition to reflect on the impact of electronics and information technology, a central theme in the next International Architecture Exhibition opening in May," explains the curator. "The title of the exhibition refers to one of the chapters that make up The Rational Absurd Because Necessary, published in 1989 with the artist's monologues that arose from his reflections on technology. The "Umanoidi" cycle consecrates Moreni as an authentic precursor who was able to understand well in advance the direction in which our society would move at great speed in the following decades." Throughout the exhibition, the works are accompanied by critical texts written by Argan, Restany, Michel Tapié, Giuseppe Marchiori, Francesco Arcangeli, Renato Barilli, Emanuel Daydé and Daniela Palazzoli.
The second exhibition is dedicated to Graham Sutherland (London, 1903-80), entitled «Bittersweet», a bittersweet referring to the mix of styles and mediums (oils, watercolours, lithographs, but also costumes and scenography) that characterises his work, «in a personal reinterpretation of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, explains the curator Roberta Calarota. His art presents expressionist, cubist, surrealist and abstract characteristics in an original mix. The result is a figuration based on a sophisticated deconstruction of forms then recomposed in a new reality, visionary and bittersweet, captured in its incessant flow and in the precarious tension of opposites: happiness and sadness, joy and horror, nature and introspection. The naturalistic impressions coexist with an existential dimension that cannot ignore the contemporary political scene tragically marked by the Second World War». The artist's visionary nature was also underlined by Argan when he identified the roots of his work «in the early and messianic Romanticism of William Blake», as he wrote in 1979. At the centre of the exhibition are works of Sutherland's mature style from the Seventies, while a part of the itinerary is dedicated to his engravings: one of his best-known cycles, «The Bestiary», created to accompany the poetic compositions of Apollinaire, is exhibited in its entirety in the 1979 edition. The exhibition is sponsored by the British Embassy in Rome.
Mattia Moreni «Ah! that Freud... “Psychoanalysis on the couch”», 1997.
Courtesy of Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m.., Bologna | Paris | Venice