Bologna, Bertozzi&Casoni and Giorgio Morandi exhibition at Galleria d'Arte Maggiore

From January 15 to May 31, 2022, the Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in Bologna will host a double exhibition, Less is more, which will compare the works of a great master of the 20th century, Giorgio Morandi, and a great duo of contemporary art, Bertozzi & Casoni. The duo, composed of Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni, had made their debut right at the Galleria d’Arte Maggiore in the 1980s and now, after achieving success all over the world, they are returning to exhibit in the Bologna gallery. The main theme of the exhibition is the homage to Giorgio Morandi, presented both with a selection of the master’s “Flowers” and “Landscapes” and with true “d’aprés Morandi” that the Bertozzi & Casoni duo has created by interpreting and filtering Morandi’s lesson through ceramics, their favorite medium. In these works by Bertozzi & Casoni, not only does the palette turn from bright to pastel, but their investigation of vanitas and transience (which has always been conducted through snapshots of flora and fauna and the leftovers of consumer civilization) also involves Morandi’s flowers, which interpreted by them conceal among the petals a presence of life with iridescent colors: small insects ready to turn into an ambiguous rebus, which leaves the door open to multiple answers. What Giorgio Morandi pursued throughout his life was a pictorial investigation conducted on a very small series of subjects: still lifes of bottles, vases of flowers and the landscape of Grizzana, a town in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines where the artist spent the summer months. These are images of the everyday known to all, which for Morandi constituted a mere formal pretext.

It is precisely the banality of these subjects that allowed the master to focus attention on the pulsating core of his research: the composition of space understood as the environmental unity of all the elements that constitute it. A space felt as an inner place, which sign after sign took shape on the engraved plate or on the canvas. A reconstructed space, so that one grasped its infinite duration and certainly not its instantaneousness: that is why when Morandi painted landscapes he never returned to the same glimpse of nature and that is why the flowers he favored were not the fresh ones, destined to change day after day, creating variations independent of his will, but dried or silk flowers, which just like the other objects featured in his still lifes, would maintain their state unchanged, creating a multiplicity of tonal effects thanks to the dust that would settle on them little by little. Temporal suspension is present in each of his works, and it is precisely this placing oneself at the margins of the flow of time that makes the great master’s lesson relevant today. Therefore, on the occasion of this exhibition, Maggiore g.a.m. intends to give space to the interpretation that the contemporary artist duo Bertozzi & Casoni makes on Giorgio Morandi’s iconic flowerpots.

The predilection present in all of Bertozzi & Casoni’s works for flora and fauna, along with the focus on the iconographic themes of vanitas and memento mori that characterizes their research, have made the Morandi theme of flowers an ideal subject to be interpreted through a multitude of evocations. If Morandi observed reality in order to grasp its abstract essence, recording it in timeless images, Bertozzi & Casoni transfigure it three-dimensionally thanks to ceramics: “matter” par excellence, which once manipulated stands as a presential sign of a snapshot captured in hyper-realistic forms, reconstructed in the smallest detail. But just as the antipodes at the end of the turn end up meeting and then blurring, it is possible to trace elements of continuity that run between Morandi and Bertozzi & Casoni: the ambiguity played out between life and lifelessness and between instantaneousness and suspension, along with the centrality of one’s inner world to interpret reality.

If, in fact, Morandi’s works focus on a few subjects to suggest a mental image preserved and reactivated by memory, Bertozzi & Casoni also choose certain sets of objects through a careful gaze to seek a connection between the aesthetic form observed and the state of mind that moved the research. Less is more thus becomes a maxim capable of telling us about the poetics of these seemingly distant artists: the master’s concentration on those few, repeated subjects marks the greatness of his research, while Bertozzi & Casoni’s works allow us to probe with adequate attention the wealth of tactile and visual information that make them the ironic and disillusioned singers of the society of accumulation and hyper productivity.

Pictured: Bertozzi & Casoni, Per Morandi (2019; polychrome ceramic, 36 x 20 x 18 cm)

Bologna, Bertozzi&Casoni and Giorgio Morandi exhibition at Galleria d'Arte Maggiore

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