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Art and History: an unceasing debate

Tolentino
Rancia Castle Historical Museum
Contemporary Art Collection

The joining of great names

The exhibition of more than a hundred sculptures and original paintings by contemporary artists opens the Historical Museum in the Rancia Castle near Tolentino (Macerata).

After the commemoration of an anniversary we need not wait for annual recurrences of the same date to point up its importance. An artistic and cultural project such as "Memories: fifty years later, 1945-1995", started by Carmine Iandoli three years ago, is still, and maybe more, valid.

First of all, it must be said, the project was not exhausted in the ephemeral event of a temporary exhibition; it took a long working-out process and it is supposed to continue. In the years, Iandoli's work has settled itself, finding place in the Contemporary Art Collection of the Historical Museum in Rancia Castle; from here, he keeps communicating with artists and public.

Great is the didactic value of the collection, both for the choice of the subject - an historical reflection on our recent past - and for the opportunity of a critical survey of today's artists and their works. "Quality" is maybe the keyword of this exhibition, a quality evident in the high level of the works of art and in the sincere enthusiasm and the generosity of artist themselves: without those peculiarities, the whole project would have been restricted to commemorative rhetoric.

The artists were asked to work on a terracotta flag-shaped form - it was a challenge! - so to have a homogeneous collection where the many linguistic possibilities of contemporary art could be better shown. The restriction, both of the form and of the theme, is only apparent: actually, the expressive possibilities, far from be limited, are multiplied, because every linguistic, formal and poetic solution realizes, to quote Schiller, its "liberty in the phenomenon". The flag surface becomes each time a canvas whose outline some artists (as Caruso, Celiberti, Consagra, Dalisi) have respected; others have put the flag vertically, ignoring the original waving movement (Bertini, Brindisi, Griffa, Sarri). Some, instead, have altered the form itself or its substance, saving the original idea, but only as a starting point to redefine movement, thickness and direction. Oki Izumi has covered with thin tricolour glass layers the form, maintaining the original volume, but denying its material existence. Eleonora Pusceddu too has used glass, still she didn't create a new shape, but broke the thin surface; the glass in the two works has a different consistence: here it recalls its past malleability. Different is the break in Arnaldo Pomodoro's work, no more accidental, but surely structural: along the breaking line, hidden under the smooth surface, the technical soul is shown.

The work of Pino Spagnulo is a torn, burnt flag, poor relic of war, the only surviving thing in the memory. Also in Fossil of Franco Zazzeri we can see the remains of the past, still lying in the mind. Corroded is the Mountain of Walter Valentini, a scrap of the moon surface. Quite different the Genesis of Carlo Zauli, who has crumpled and wrung the flag as if it was really made of cloth.

Other works are based on the chromatic metaphor of the red colour (Ajmone, Baratella, Belbusti, Cherchi, Della Torre, Fabbri, Ramous, Veronesi, Zigaina, Sughi and the tragic blood flow of Luigi Mainolfi). Interesting also the red soaked jute, partly covering the flag, in the work of Campus: a chromatic-materic act, like that of Giò Pomodoro, in whose work can be seen, among old finds, the symbolic objects of the past conflict.

Quite different, in its spatial direction and in its plastic power, the work of Sangregorio; different are also the colours used by Alviani, Barbanti and Griffa and the gestural acts of Scaiola and Schiavocampo.

We could quote one by one all these works and find among them sophisticated references and refined tangential points. This exhibition involves not only art criticism, but art history too: Iandoli has proposed a high level contemporary art anthology, rich of appealing connections.

Many other artists however, and not only the mentioned ones, are worthy of praise: Antico, Benedetti, Bodini, Bonichi, Calabria, . Caminati, Canuti, Carmi, Cascella, Cattaneo, Ceccomori, Ceretti, Comencini, Consagra, Dangelo, De Carvalho, De Filippi, Del Pezzo, De Vecchi, Echaurren, Fiume, Franceschini, Gianquinto, Guccione, Habiche, Hsiao Chin, Jandoli, Isgrò, Kodra, La Pietra, Longaretti, Marchese, Mariani, Marzulli, Mastroianni, Migneco, Moncada, Mucchi, Mulas, Munari, Mussio, Ossola, Paradiso, Pardi, Pescatori, Porzano, Pozzati, Raciti, Reggiani, Reich, Repossi, Rinaldi, Rossello, Rotella, Sassu, Soffiantino, Sortino, Stefanoni, Tadini, Timoncini, Titonel, Treccani, Trubbiani.

We could try a historical and artistic reading of these authors just only considering their ages: from the artists who, fifty years ago, were young and took part in the event, to those who weren't born yet and are now reflecting on a past they didn't experienced.

The generation of the politically committed young artists is here represented by Boriani and Cavaliere: in their works, reason, creating doubts, and fantasy, providing certainties, meet and communicate. This is the meeting of two protagonists of the 1964 Venice Biennial, the starting point of a cultural revolution which was urged by a still unsatisfied need of change. To another historical revolution is connected Staccioli's work, Dear Malevic, where a red acute triangle, as a wedge, opens a passage to reason.

The reading-key chosen by Iandoli - and stressed also in the catalogue and in the video - points out the trends of contemporary art more than the single artists; the works are in fact collected according to a critical partition: iconic conceptualism, critical figuration, visionary figuration, images of memory, between nature and history, objective image, lyrical abstraction, abstract expressionism, informal, between project and decoration, metaphor of the assemblage, neo-concrete research.

Both the cultivated and the unskilled public passes through these waving sea of artistic works, in search of emotions, comparisons, suggestiveness, visual incitements, and in his meditation is helped by the voices of poets, that cannot renounce to express a deeply-felt complaint and a touching regret. And it's still the voice of a great poet, engraved on Trafeli's terracotta, that we hear at the end of our visit: "Libertà va cercando, ch'è sì cara / come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta" (Dante, Purgatorio, I, vv. 71-72: Virgil speaking to Cato "He [Dante] is searching for his liberty, and how precious she is, the man, who refuses life for her, knows very well")

Maria Fratelli