Evergreen: twenty years of Bertozzi & Casoni's career on display in San Marino

From October 2 to November 30, 2021, the Claudio Poleschi Arte Contemporanea Gallery in Dogana(San Marino) welcomes Evergreen, the first solo exhibition of the duo Bertozzi & Casoni in the Titan republic. Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni are exhibiting in San Marino their painted sculptures that have gained international fame and reception in important Museums and prestigious art galleries thanks to complex and engaging iconographies and a masterful use of a material such as ceramics taken to expressive and mimetic levels never before achieved. In their “contemplations of the present,” with references to the great artistic category of vanitas, the attraction to what is transient, transitory and perishable becomes an internationally recognized icon of an, not only contemporary, human condition.

The works in the exhibition date from the last two decades of their activity and make up an exhibition that in terms of quantity of works and temporal terms is almost like an anthology of their most successful production. An initial nucleus of “historical” works includes Albino al bar from 2002 (a baby albino gorilla sitting on a table by Saarinen offering visitors an ashtray filled with cigarette butts); Barrel with parrot from 2007 (decommissioned oil barrel topped by a beautiful parrot); Bardhal from 2008; and, among the more recent works, Minimal Leftovers from 2010 (a three-legged bar table that serves as the base for a still life) and Composition no.14 of 2009, a scaled-down version of the theme of first-aid kits presented at the Venice Biennale the same year.

Another core consists of the series of handbags with the names Lucrezia and Greta but also April 21 to suggest a hypothetical event. One of the most popular accessories, normally closed and impenetrable, becomes, when opened, an opportunity to enter a complex world of objects that tell of events, memories and contradictions. Between the exterior and interior of the handbag is played out the game between representation and reality, between theatricality and concreteness, between illusions and banality.

Then there are some of the most recent works (from 2020 and 2021) dedicated to masters such as Gauguin, Van Gogh (the Sunflowers in the photo) and Morandi, in the wake of an unchanged respect for the great tradition of art. A past master such as Arcimboldo had already been the subject of reinvention with the Five Seasons cycle whose 2012 Studio for Summer and 2020 Autumn are on display. To conclude, the exhibition displays Portrait of 2019, executed on the occasion of the Modena Philosophy Festival of the same year: the famous ambiguity of Ingres’ Mademoiselle Rivière is developed in an unprecedented sculptural version, entirely in ceramic, replacing the female face with that of a young gorilla.

Evergreen: twenty years of Bertozzi & Casoni's career on display in San Marino

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