Art is not just beauty: works are not passive. On the exhibition of works confiscated from the Mafia.

It has often been repeated, slavishly following a pure and forcibly utopian ideal, that art elevates and purifies the soul of the viewer lost in the world. But art has not been (and probably never will be) a mere site of that longed-for “beauty,” or a refuge for all those souls in search of peace. On the contrary, it has always been the scene of fierce conflicts and contentions where the morbid desire for possession sensually dances with the tragic and where freedom intertwines its plots with those of the shadow of organized crime, which makes it a prison of power and silence. It is in this perpetual dialogue between light and darkness that the SalvArti exhibition, hosted at the Palazzo Reale in Milan until Jan. 26, 2025, and then at the Palazzo della Cultura “Pasquino Crupi” in Reggio Calabria from Feb. 8 to April 27, 2025, fits in: the exhibition tells precisely the stories of salvation and redemption of eighty works of art taken from the mafias.

Walking among the works by Mario Schifano, Robert Rauschenberg, Carlo Carrà, Salvator Dali or Fontana, one can discover a story that goes far beyond that of the works themselves since, as the Austrian art historian Alois R.Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, monuments and works of art are neither immobile nor passive, but carry within them a plurality of values and meanings that interact, transform and collide over time. In the frenetic advance of our living and the ceaseless flow of history, works of art cannot be relegated to the role of mere aesthetic objects, devoid of life and meaning, but should be considered as infinite worlds that preserve all those nodes of collective memory and all those identity symbols that each of us, with our own unique vision in scrutinizing the world, helps to shape. Each work does not merely tell a single story, but is a crossroads of sedimented images, of hidden or manifest recognition and rivalry, perhaps finding in this irreducible multiplicity of values the reason for its interpretive fecundity, but also for its constant vulnerability, which exposes it to constant contention and transformation.

The works in the exhibition interweave complex stories that twist and knot to different geographies, and one of its chapters takes off along the famous, yet unsuspected, Via Margutta in Rome where an art gallery turned out to be the hub of an intricate and sophisticated international money laundering network. In 2013, the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Grouping, in collaboration with the Guardia di Finanza’s Nucleo di Polizia Valutaria, launched investigations, uncovering a criminal system of impressive complexity at the center of which were works of art of great value attributed to masters such as Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, exploited as tools of exchange for illicit activities. Dense investigations, these, which converged in the confiscation in 2018 with a final ruling by the Court of Rome.

But the story does not stop there and moves to Reggio Calabria, where a second line of research uncovered a further link between art and crime. An entrepreneur affiliated with the underworld, using a video game rental business, concealed a system of tax evasion intended to finance illegal operations. Here, investigations conducted by the Court of Reggio Calabria led, in 2015, to the seizure of 22 works of art that were later assigned to state property.

The works on display in the exhibition also include those of Palestinian artists such as Al Malhi, Bishara and Tuma, whose creations address highly topical issues of oppression and identity, such as Apartheid Impression 2 by Rana Bishara, which uses extremely powerful symbolism to reflect on the sense of trauma and loss of collective memory. Mary Tuma’s Wind Collection, on the other hand, captures the wind of Palestinian places in small bottles, evoking the invisible connection to spaces separated by all those physical and ideological walls, while in House 197, Jawad Al Malhi explores the suspended lives on the fringes of Jerusalem, capturing the tension between precariousness and permanence in refugee camps.

The exhibition itinerary is further enriched with works such as Cantata Bluia Libro Dore, the result of the collaboration between Pier Paolo Calzolari and Pierre Thoretton, or with Mario Schifano’s Water Lilies, which transport the viewer into a visual universe where landscapes and natures reinterpret the pictorial tradition with that subtle sensitivity typical of the artist, while Andy Warhol, with his silkscreened flower, transforms a simple natural motif into an artistic manifesto charged with social implications. Franco Gentilini and Agostino Bonalumi add further depth to the itinerary: the former with the stylized geometry of Ricordo di Venezia, capable of filtering memory through a poetic lens, the latter with his design studies that embody the rigor of artistic creation applied to large environmental works.

But the tale continues with artists probing the boundaries between reality and imagination: Leonor Fini, in Figure, explores the complexity of the female universe, while Jan Van Oost, with his poetics poised between eros and thanatos, leads us into the most intimate meanderings of human existence. Vinicio Berti, with Ah Ban 9HV, fuses painting, illustration and comics, and in parallel Robert Rauschenberg and Christo transform everyday materials into works that question the very nature of art and its relationship to time and space.

Among the rooms of this exhibition, the visitor might discover an art that is not only a vehicle for that overly sought after “beauty,” but that becomes an instrument of resistance, memory and transformation, capable of bearing witness not only to the fiercest contentions and morbid possession that have often surrounded it, but also to its ability to resurrect and restore meaning to what has been lost, stolen, silenced. Art, then, far from being a peaceful refuge for the spirit or a serene oasis, reveals itself for what it really is: a living, dynamic entity, charged with the tensions that have always accompanied existence and never a neutral symbol, immune to human passions and conflicts, but a battleground where ideals and drives of the darkest kind clash.

And that cruel desire for possession is none other than one of the primary forces that moves the human soul toward art, and it seems, in light of the confiscations explored among the rooms of the retrospective, that it is not so rare to unearth a craving so strong that it turns into obsession, driving humans to seize or distort what they cannot have or control since it, as the poet and playwright Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, is not harmless. “Beauty is the beginning of the tremendous”: it is ruthless, disturbing and shaking by awakening deep passions that can as much elevate as overwhelm.

But in beauty there is also the terrifying and irresistible ambivalence inherent in art itself, which both seduces and divides: it is a beacon and a cry, a force that orders and disrupts, as Charles Baudelaire described it, in his Ode to Beauty. An ambiguity, this one, that Riegl himself had grasped perfectly: the meaning of works of art is not fixed, but the result of our modern gaze, of our ability to attribute values and narratives to it, and this makes it an eternal forge of ideas, but also perpetually exposed to human contradictions. It is a mirror and amplification of man’s passions, it is his love and his obsession, his desire for eternity and his need to assert his power, and, perhaps, that is why it does not console, but troubles as it forces us to confront ourselves, our highest aspirations and our deepest weaknesses.

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