For its third event, garage BENTIVOGLIO, the Palazzo Bentivoglio project in Bologna that each month makes a piece from its collection available to the gaze of passersby in the art showcase on Via del Borgo di San Pietro, presents Matteo Nasini’s The Lost Garden from Nov. 15 to Dec. 9, 2023.
Usually inserted between the neoclassical columns of the Palazzo’s rooms, the work is presented in a completely new exhibition format. In fact, among the reflections the project poses is that of the work’s polysemy: rearranged within a neutral space such as that of the showcase, relieved from comparison with other works or historicized spaces, the work in fact acquires new meanings. The columns that make up Nasini’s work carry with them mythological and archetypal meanings, from the iconographic attributes of legendary heroes such as Hercules and Samson to the echo of the collapse of a majestic building in Palazzo Te’s Sala dei Giganti that holds back Alcyoneus and his companions’ climb to Olympus, and, in their new location, they are not only meant to question passersby about how art can participate in their lives, but are also meant to be opportunities to ask collectors new questions about the works they own.
“For works of art, the first encounter, the first glance never applies; they must always be re-watched, giving them a chance to change along with us, because neither they nor we remain the same. Re-looking is an anti-historical human activity, because it contradicts the normal flow of time passing by, of Κρόνος that irretrievably engulfs everything and gives no one time to return to things,” explains Davide Trabucco, curator of the project. “A showcase on the street,” Trabucco adds, “instead gives the work a chance to participate in our everyday life, because between one passage and another, between one reading and another, life passes. Moreover, the showcase allows the viewer to dantesquely look and pass by, without having to care too much about what and how much meaning he or she carries after this passage.”
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Bologna, Matteo Nasini's lost garden in Bentivoglio garage art showcase |
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