Fondazione Luigi Rovati: Opere site specific

Bilingual edition Ita/EngGiulio Paolini’s production is a metaphysical reflection on the artistic creative process. In fact, Paolini believes that the work already exists in some way, before the  intervention of the artist, who is simply the first to contemplate it. This publication is devoted to Paolini’s site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation.  Entitled Era finora, Paolini’s work is composed of two plaster heads in profile, one female and the other male. They evoke, respectively, the classical and neoclassical: the origin of the Western canon of art and of its revival at the dawn of the contemporary era. Framed by a display case, the faces seem to measure the perimeter of a space or to mark a path, like milestones. Their gaze traces a perspective accented by superimposed photographic reproductions: a kind of “portrait gallery”, a continuum of images that mark the history of man and art. The images move between past and present, as testimonies of times and spaces that are distant yet present in the here and now of viewing the work. Art history is an automatic reference for Paolini, for whom there is no difference between antique and contemporary art. All art is equal, being the investigation of the world through vision as a mental act. The time of art is that of the work, not of its creator: when the life of the artists, be they Etruscan, Greek or of the Renaissance, is over, the indefinite present of the work remains.

Bilingual edition Ita/EngFrancesco Simeti is the creator of a visual universe that through a mix of naturalistic and surrealistic elements – ranging from the botanical to those inspired by medieval miniatures – analyzes the development of natural history, showing its relationship to human social history. This publication is devoted to Simeti’s site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation. Composed of two tapestries (Alla corte della civetta and Elleboro) and a series of decorative ceramic elements (Phantázō), Simeti’s work operates on multiple levels between history and fiction, reinventing the antique in personal ways and forms. Inspired by medieval bestiaries, the tapestries feature a tangled mass of hybrid and metamorphic creatures – owls, salamanders, sea monsters, unicorns, felines, rhinoceroses – through which unrecognizable human figures wearing gas masks, helmets, and respirators seek to make their way: the image represents the traumatic relationship between humans and the natural world. In conversation with Luigi Fassi, Simeti describes the elements that triggered the creative process: the boiseries and stuccoes of the palazzo (home to the Art Museum), located in a series of rooms that had remained unoccupied for years; photodocumentation of some dispersed 18th-century tapestries on the theme of chinoiserie; and a collection of precious Etruscan buccheri in black ceramic. A combination of centuries and styles, revisited and renewed, in which ancient, modern and contemporary interact mimetically.