At Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Christian Balzano's solo exhibition reflects on planet and identities

From January 19 to March 12, 2023, Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence is hosting the exhibition Christian Balzano. Outside the World, curated by Marco Tonelli and promoted by the Metropolitan City of Florence under the patronage of the Region of Tuscany, organized by MUS.E and Casa d’Arte San Lorenzo.

“It is on this earth that men wield power and covet riches, throwing humanity into chaos and unleashing fratricidal wars”: so reads the map engraved around 1580 by cartographer Epichtonius Cosmopolites, which depicts the hood of a jester with the world instead of a face.

Inspired by this image that speaks of vanitas and the folly of men, Christian Balzano conceived the exhibition project with which he intends to raise questions about the condition of the planet and above all to reflect on this question: "Can thehistorical and cultural identity of a place, of a community, be completely disrupted and changed by living together with other people, with different identities?"

The exhibition at Palazzo Medici Riccardi revolves around this question, and develops in thematic sections related to each other: pluralism of religion, contaminated and contaminating nature, continents, countries and flags. Themes around which the exhibited works focus, all united by the use of fabric, a material that symbolizes with its weaves the very skin and flesh of nations in all their geopolitical complexity.

“Historical movements, of ideas, of peoples, despite the violent resistance determined by the desire to possess the lives of others, determine in spite of themselves whirlpools from which humanity emerges, recognizes itself as such and moves forward, going beyond those whom the Gospel calls leaders of nations who exercise power over them,” said Letizia Perini, councilor of the Metropolitan City of Florence delegated to Culture. “Christian Balzano, effectively using different tools for the expression of his art and drawing on the heritage of great religious traditions, seems to play on what it really means to be inside or outside the world. He stands outside those who want to command it and not serve its inhabitants. In the end he is outside the world who feels and believes himself to be master but who, even at the cost of great suffering caused to others, will not win.”

“There are here the great themes of our living: our being-in-the-world of Heidegerian memory, our inhabiting space and time by continually designing ourselves and taking care of ourselves, others and the world,” explains Valentina Zucchi, curator of the museum at Palazzo Medici Riccardi. “Only in this way, by posing ourselves as the ideal connective tissue of a planet that we insist on governing rather than listening to, can we offer our contribution to a story greater than ourselves and all of humanity, in which we can express our dimension with authenticity, leaving our questions open, welcoming the otherness of individuals, species, eras and recognizing ourselves as an osmotic part of a whole that is together within us and outside of us. The works in the exhibition suggest trails, gazes, interpretations; the artist poetically inhabits the world and suggests to us, with the inherent fascination of artistic language, new ways to live in it.”

“Casa d’Arte San Lorenzo has been working closely with Christian Balzano for many years, encouraging and supporting his art,” says Roberto Milani of Casa d’Arte San Lorenzo. “Inaugurating a solo exhibition in the museum rooms of Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence is more than ever an honor and a source of pride and boast for all the work done to date.”

“Iconic but also jagged, made with chemical and natural processes at the same time (techniques documented with a video in the exhibition), but also designed according to careful cartographic reconstructions, the works in the exhibition reaffirm, according to Christian Balzano’s thought, that although the present we are living does not give any reassurance nor decreed any end to history, even with all its uncertainties and atrocities, it is the only active force we can cling to in order to avert shipwreck and not lose hope in the future of a new world, with no more borders and therefore all to be discovered,” explains curator Marco Tonelli. “In this perhaps the practice of art and the very figure of the artist, of every artist probably (whom we could metaphorically call a madman, a jester, a trickster, an eccentric cartographer of the routes of the present or a dreamer of a new world) fit perfectly at the helm of this difficult and often vacuous navigation.”

“The enormous ideological contrasts and rapid changes taking place (geo-political, religious, cultural and consequently social) highlight the need for reflection and change. Today, nature has highlighted this urgent need,” said artist Christian Balzano. “In this project, the protagonist will be the fabric that, like an individual, a very specific identity, will take on new forms and new meanings through the clash or encounter with new elements, substances that, like a virus, alter it, modify it and take it to extremes. The space and time employed for each individual work, will condition the final result making it different from each other. But diversity, seen as richness, can only generate new forces of free thought.”

Closely related works, such as the four large marble stamps with the symbols of the world’s most widespread religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu) to which is added the artist’s “personal” stamp (which has a bull as its effigy); cloths on which maps of countries at war, transformed by sea water, or flags of countries whose borders are separated by walls or impassable lines: all elements that go to make up a critical atlas of the globe, which Balzano approaches as one large and multifaceted social and political “fabric.”

The multiformity of techniques used by the artist documents the plurality of cultures and identities, but also the necessity of their coexistence. An environmentalinstallation entitled I am Fabric, consisting of a life-size bronze little girl pulling a large sphere representing the world, made of different kinds of fabrics, is also meant to remind us that we all live on the same planet.

The exhibition develops frequent themes in Balzano’s art, which investigates and reinterprets the major issues of globalization,social integration or climate change, and for this occasion presents recent works and unpublished works.

The catalog will be published by Skira publishing house during the exhibition, with texts by Marco Tonelli, Sara Taglialagamba and Valentina Zucchi.

Image: Exhibition layout Christian Balzano. Out of the World. Photo by Lena Shaposhnikova, detail

At Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Christian Balzano's solo exhibition reflects on planet and identities

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