Gualtieri dedicates an evening to Ligabue: viewing of award-winning film and special opening of exhibition

Thursday, September 16, 2021 at 8:30 p.m. in Piazza Bentivoglio in Gualtieri (Reggio Emilia) is the screening of the award-winning film Volevo nascondermi (I wanted to hide ) by Giorgio Diritti. The event officially opens the fall exhibition season of the Antonio Ligabue Museum Foundation, which, until Nov. 14, 2021, presents in the Salone dei Giganti of Palazzo Bentivoglio the exhibition Ligabue, the rediscovered figure. 11 contemporary artists in comparison, curated by Nadia Stefanel and Matteo Galbiati.

During the evening, the public will have the opportunity to learn more about the life and art of Antonio Ligabue, through the performance of Elio Germano (winner of the David di Donatello 2021 as best actor in a leading role) and through a visit to the exhibition (special opening from 5 p.m. to midnight), which displays a significant body of the painter’s works collected and selected by Francesco Negri.

The exhibition presents an unprecedented comparison between Antonio Ligabue and eleven contemporary artists (Evita Andùjar, Mirko Baricchi, Elisa Bertaglia, Marco Grassi, Fabio Lombardi, Juan Eugenio Ochoa, Michele Parisi, Ettore Pinelli, Maurizio Pometti, Giorgio Tentolini and Marika Vicari). Artists Elisa Bertaglia, Fabio Lombardi and Marika Vicari will give guided tours of the exhibition in October and November (dates will be announced on the website and social channels of the Antonio Ligabue Museum Foundation).

Thanks to the relationship built over the years, together with his father Sergio, with Ligabue’s many collectors, Francesco Negri was able to offer sixteen works by Antonio Ligabue, including La leonessa con zebra from 1958-59, exhibited for the first time in Gualtieri. The exhibition also includes the small Self-Portrait of 1940-42, among the very first ones made by the artist at the beginning of his second artistic period, and some paintings from previous important collections, such as The Cockfight of 1958-59 andPlowing of 1944-45, which belonged to Walter Chiari and Romolo Valli, respectively.

The exhibition’s guiding image is a 1953 Figure of a Woman: a large-scale work that constitutes, as Nadia Stefanel explains, “a sort of ante litteram advertisement,” but also the synthesis of “the attractive power of what Ligabue always lacked, a woman, to be reciprocated in that never reciprocated love of a lifetime.”

Artists were invited to place themselves in dialogue with Ligabue’s works. “Next to the figure of Ligabue,” declares Matteo Galbiati, “we wanted to bring together some young artists who reflected, deepening them, even at a distance, his same suggestions; who had expressiveness founded on the same sensitive ganglia. The choice of these artists looked, then, with precipitous attention to the specificity of their research, which, without conditioning or choice of occasion, have always placed the essence of their vision precisely on the soul as the center of value for their aesthetic experiences. The theme and concept of the figure represented is the means to go beyond the immediacy of the visible account and let the tension and passion of images that transfigure common and shared experiences surface.”

The exhibition is divided into two sections: the first develops around the epidermal, carnal and physical energy of color and its realization through making itself concrete in painting (Andùjar, Baricchi, Grassi, Pinelli, Pometti); the second emphasizes the transfiguring power of art, which captures the image at the instant it becomes memory, dream, miracle, apparition, fixing it before its inexorable disappearance (Bertaglia, Lombardi, Ochoa, Parisi, Tentolini, Vicari).

The pictorial representations, through which Evita Andújar (Écija, Spain, 1974) expresses her poetics, reflect the many facets of our ordinary everyday life. The protagonists, with blurred and scattered features and disjointed faces, melt away without leaving a trace of their identity, giving rise to blurred images made of deliberate inaccuracies, which amplify an evanescent and at times altered perception of reality.

With Mirko Baricchi (La Spezia, 1970) we find ourselves projected into a dreamlike atmosphere, amid colors with woodland references and vegetal intertwining. The lyrical dimension is given by the charm, enchantment and mystery of his works, in gradations that fade from earth tones to rusty and dull red tones, from sick greens to calm and placid browns, between lights and shadows, in settings that restore scars of our deepest memories.

The lightness and transparency of the elements create a powerful dreamlike atmosphere, a testimony built by Elisa Bertaglia (Rovigo, 1983) on metaphors and symbols of nature that resonate like an ancestral song echoing in the deepest human interiority. Bertaglia builds a path of research and development of a free and personal identity and awareness, in which the innermost aspects of imagination are explored.

Through the unexpected harmonious combination of decoration and hyperrealism, two dimensions that seem to meet incidentally, Marco Grassi (Milan, 1966) allows us to witness the overcoming of the archaic conception of portraiture, giving the observer the possibility of giving life to a silent dialogue with the tacit, but vibrant, protagonist figures of his paintings.

Fabio Lombardi (Gavardo, Brescia, 1993) focuses on decadence in all its forms to make it a conscious testimony of human nature. Some figures build or decompose, between shadows and light, sometimes annulled, sometimes affirmed in an unstable balance between presence and absence.

The painting of Juan Eugenio Ochoa (Medellin, Colombia, 1983) prefigures itself as an act of memory. The faces represented through layering, transparencies, mystery and emptiness are essential features to call man back to the dream. The subjects of his works, with indefinite physicality, by means of a pictorial layering of veils, appear incorporeal ghosts emphasizing the sense, at times mystical, that hovers around the images and places them in an ethereal space, expressing the changing and fragile human condition.

The genesis of the works of Michele Parisi (Riva del Garda, Trento, 1983) comes from a mixture of interests that, leading him to move between photography and painting, thus giving birth to a personal and intimate language. The photographic true datum and the imaginative fictitious datum establish between them a mysterious and evocative bond that, like memory, opens to distant representations that associate, layering and generating eternal moments.

In the century of images, television, the web and newspapers are inexhaustible sources of representations of conflicts, clashes and guerrilla moments, which become the main themes through which Ettore Pinelli(Modica, Ragusa, 1984) conducts an anthropological analysis aimed at investigating the most instinctive aspects of man. The artist draws from photographs and news events, which become a research tool as well as a source of visual cues and an emblem of reality in its authentic and unsettling truth.

The artistic production of Maurizio Pometti (Catania, 1987) is delicate and refined, but at the same time remarkably tormented, retracing familiar scenes and from his childhood that take place in settings crystallized in an infinite instant, which brings with it past feelings, sensations and reminiscences that surface in the present.

Giorgio Tentolini (Casalmaggiore, Cremona, 1978) seems to make blurring, dissimulation and chiaroscuro play the cornerstones of his poetics. Starting from a purely photographic study, he transforms the moments captured by the shot into works that, at first perception, appear two-dimensional. In reality, his works arise from the layering of layers of material, landing in a three-dimensionality creating a true bas-relief in negative.

The delicacy of watercolor, in the works of Marika Vicari (Vicenza, 1979), seems to merge with the rigidity of black graphite, creating a strong contrast that is unexpectedly harmonious and lyrical. The forest seems to emerge from a fairy-tale dimension deprived of its characters, motionless and suspended in a parallel time. It is precisely the absence of figures in these poetic representations that heightens that sense of melancholic loneliness one feels when looking at them, while remaining enchanted by them.

To attend the screening of the film Wanted to Hide Me, it is necessary to follow the directions at www.viaggioagualtieri.it. Reservations are recommended to visit the exhibition at Palazzo Bentivoglio.

Hours: Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; special openings Thursday, Sept. 16 from 5 p.m. to midnight and Saturday, Sept. 18 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Pictured, set up of the exhibition Ligabue, the rediscovered figure. 11 contemporary artists in comparison. Ph.Credit Fabio Fantini

Gualtieri dedicates an evening to Ligabue: viewing of award-winning film and special opening of exhibition

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