Carlo Zinelli's art brut is on display in Mantua, at Palazzo Te

From March 17 to June 9, Palazzo Te in Mantua is hosting an exhibition-dossier dedicated to the vital and surprising obsessions of Carlo Zinelli (San Giovanni Lupatoto, 1916 - Chievo, 1974), an exponent ofArt Brut in Italy and a yet-to-be-discovered visual reference that is highly relevant today. Entitled Carlo Zinelli. Visione Continua, the exhibition-dossier consists of a corpus of 32 works on paper, made between 1958 and 1970 and mostly double-sided, kept by the Fondazione Cariverona and visible through an exhibition structure created for the rooms of Palazzo Te. Visitors to the exhibition will get to know and appreciate a unique and disruptive painter who to this day continues to be a secret name and, therefore, still a revelation.

Produced by the Municipality of Mantua, Fondazione Palazzo Te and Fondazione Cariverona Cultura, the exhibition reflects on the experience of an artist with a vivid imagination through tempera paintings, collages and drawings on paper never previously exhibited in their entirety. The installation itself intends to allow the visitor to admire the works in full, being able to fully observe their colors and strokes as well as allowing the total view of the 26 double-sided works, one of the peculiarities of Zinelli’s modus operandi, who always worked instinctively on the totality of the surface of the sheet.

Carlo Zinelli. Visione Continua will be accompanied by a catalog published by Corraini Editore with essays by Luca Massimo Barbero and Lorenza Roverato , and in autumn 2019 the exhibition will move to Verona, with a renewed layout within the exhibition space of Palazzo Pellegrini on Via Achille Forti, the institutional headquarters of Fondazione Cariverona.

“This dossier dedicated to Carlo Zinelli wants to be a way to free his production from the cage of therapeutic art,” says Luca Massimo Barbero, curator of the exhibition and artistic director of the Fondazione Cariverona Collection. “Zinelli was an artist in his own right, and his works are independent of his illness. His style on the one hand strongly and in a pioneering way reaffirms the value of the image as a vehicle for free expression, and on the other hand, he becomes the interpreter, anticipating it, of a certain figuration that we find cited in the signs, figures and strokes that characterize some of Enzo Cucchi’s large canvases, Öyvind Fahlström’s maps or Yayoi Kusama’s obsessions, experiments with the forms and images of bodies so dear to today’s art.”

Alessandro Mazzucco, President of Fondazione Cariverona, says, “The exhibition dedicated to Carlo Zinelli is part of the Foundation’s desire to open up to the public, especially to that of its reference territories, with a view to enhancing the Collection and collaborating with some of Italy’s most interesting cultural institutions. The relationship with Mantua, which together with Verona, Vicenza, Belluno and Ancona is part of our areas of action, finds a tangible outlet also thanks to the help of the Municipality of Mantua and Fondazione Palazzo Te, with which, we are sure, there will be a way to work again in the future.”

The Director of Fondazione Palazzo Te, Stefano Baia Curioni, adds, “The story of Carlo Zinelli, which is one of the reasons why Fondazione Palazzo Te accepted the generous proposal of Fondazione Cariverona and Luca Massimo Barbero, goes beyond the history and, if we want, even beyond the rhetoric of Art Brut, of the relationship between madness, mental illness, the sickness of living and painting, which has crossed the nineteenth and twentieth century history from Van Gogh onward. It is the simultaneously salvific and hopeless tale of how poetry, harmony, and art can inhabit the human even regardless of what one knows, one’s intellectual background. Salvific because it is a tale of how extreme marginal humility can give birth to flowers of greatness; hopeless because this flowering does not take away from the drama and, if you will, the tragedy of silence to which illness and imprisonment condemn. This exhibition is a beautiful opportunity for thought, we are grateful to those who curated it and those who wanted to support it, and it is an opportunity for renewed institutional collaboration that we hope will bear lasting fruit.”

For all information you can visit the official website of Palazzo Te.

Pictured: Carlo Zinelli, Three Black Insects and Yellow Tree (1958-59; tempera on paper, 30 x 50 cm; Fondazione Cariverona Collection). Photo credit: Stefano Saccomani

Source: press release

Carlo Zinelli's art brut is on display in Mantua, at Palazzo Te

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