Florence, Museo Novecento dedicates three exhibitions to three artists: De Pisis, Paolini and Vitone

Three exhibitions, three artists, three generations in comparison: Filippo de Pisis, Giulio Paolini and Luca Vitone meet at the Museo Novecento in Florence in a three-voice dialogue as part of an exhibition project starting March 18 and running through September 7, 2022. The new season of exhibitions proposes a surprising and completely original exhibition project that allows for a deeper understanding of three seemingly very different artists, rereading their production from an unprecedented perspective. Three solo exhibitions, separate but interconnected, that give rise to a game of mirrors and thematic comparisons.

There are common features in the artistic path of Filippo Tibertelli de Pisis (Ferrara, 1896 - Milan, 1956), an eclectic Ferrara painter and scholar, and in that of Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940), one of the great protagonists of Italian and international art from the 1960s to the present. Their works function like rebuses and allegories, the objects and elements that make up their visual repertoire must be deciphered in order to enter the mysterious and disorienting game of art, the ultimate meaning of which nevertheless remains elusive. Many of the works of both De Pisis and Paolini are a continuous coming and going in art history. Here then are invoked works by authors from past or contemporary eras: paintings within paintings, chains of iconographic references and figurative loves, ranging from Poussin to Chardin, from El Greco to Goya, from De Chirico to classical art. If in a painting by De Pisis we discover the features of Antinous evoked, in Paolini the canon of classical beauty returns through a plaster cast of a sculpture by Polyclitus. Although belonging to two distant seasons of art, there are multiple assonances in the two artists. As in De Pisis, in Paolini presenting the artist’s studio or the painter’s tools is a way of talking about the play of art and the world of images. In their works De Pisis and Paolini combine recollection and memory, lightness and melancholy, constantly evading the chronicle and flattening on phenomenal reality. Last but not least, it is important to note how they both entrusted their imagery and feelings and thoughts to writing, particularly poetry.

The exhibition Filippo De Pisis. The Illusion of Superficiality, the brainchild of Sergio Risaliti, co-curated with Lucia Mannini and organized in collaboration with the Associazione per Filippo De Pisis, will feature more than forty works by the Ferrara painter and man of letters on the second floor of the Museo Novecento. Often accused of pursuing a painting with a neo-impressionist “decorative superficiality”-because of his rapid, light brushstrokes and pleasing color combinations-De Pisis instead constructed many of his major paintings through a play of cross-references and references, both autobiographical and cultural. The exhibition, born from a careful re-reading of critics, starting with Francesco Arcangeli and ending with Paolo Fossati, intends to emphasize this complexity through a careful and studied selection of works in which the artist adopted expedients that anticipate, after all, those of the conceptual art of the 1960s. The magical and mysterious suspension between reality and unreality is the protagonist of De Pisis’s still lifes even when it is an empty canvas that solicits reflection in the viewer, inviting him to investigate more deeply the meaning of the things exhibited in a painting and going beyond the visual pleasantness of his painting.

Among the great masters of twentieth-century Italian art, Giulio Paolini is the protagonist of an unprecedented exhibition project that brings together works from his most recent production in dialogue with the Renaissance architecture of the ground-floor rooms of the Museo Novecento. The title of the exhibition, When is the Present?, curated by Bettina Della Casa and Sergio Risaliti, is taken from a letter written in 1922 by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas Salomè, from which Giulio Paolini takes his cue to conduct his own meditation on time and our inability to grasp it, combining questions about the role of art and the figure of the artist with those about existence and its flow. As always in his production, Giulio Paolini resorts to a vast repertoire of literary, mythological and philosophical references, recalled through photographic reproduction, collage and plaster casts, to which articulated and composite arrangements, hinging on quotations, duplications and fragmentations, are the pendant, to give life to a theater of evocation. Paolini’s works call into question the tools of art making, the figure of the author and his relationship with the work and with the observer, in a quest that draws nourishment from the history of art itself: from the birth of Renaissance perspective to the survival of myth in iconography, to the perpetuation of classical models and the return of the temporal suspension typical of de Chirico’s metaphysics.

Paolini himself has repeatedly declared his unconditional love for Beato Angelico, electing the Museo di San Marco in Florence as his ideal museum. On the occasion of this exhibition, the Turin-based artist has created a framed collage set up on an easel, inspired by the famous Noli me tangere fresco preserved inside the convent of San Marco. The work will be displayed just inside the cell of the same name in front of the Dominican friar’s painting.

De Pisis and Paolini constitute two important references for Luca Vitone, who enters the construction of the exhibition project by continuing this mise en abyme with a series of site-specific works within the D’après exhibition. While a painting by De Pisis gives Vitone the opportunity to elaborate an olfactory sculpture (a room in the museum is pervaded by the scent of a flower represented in the canvas Il gladiolo fulminato conserved in Ferrara and intentionally not present in the exhibition), in the other case Vitone has retrieved from Giulio Paolini’s studio some dust, which has become pictorial material to make a watercolor that through this expedient wants to stage the artist’s atelier. Vitone’s operation is completed with a double installation within the exhibition space that houses the exhibition dedicated to De Pisis. In one of the first rooms, visitors will discover a herbarium that alludes to the botanical interests of the Ferrara-born artist, who also liked to call himself a naturalist, entomologist and miniaturist. In the same space one will come across a puppet, whose features depict Vitone. The same mechanism of translation or transference is evidenced by a rag puppet that appears in a photograph of De Pisis in his studio, an archival document used by Vitone to make a wallpaper that will bind in its entirety the exhibition rooms on the second floor of the museum. On this wallpaper will be displayed the works of De Pisis featured in the exhibition, in an alienating arrangement that fuels the evocative and conceptual play of the entire exhibition project.

Three exhibitions that aim to create a maze of references and connections between one artistic universe and another, and transport the viewer into “theater of evocation.”

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Novecento Museum.

Pictured: Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta con capriccio di Goya (1925; oil on canvas; Milan, private collection). Photo by Fabio Mantegna.

Florence, Museo Novecento dedicates three exhibitions to three artists: De Pisis, Paolini and Vitone

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