Journey of light: in Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, dialogue between Parmigiani and Herrero

From Oct. 27, 2023, to Jan. 21, 2024, the Museo Novecento in Florence will host an exhibition project featuring the works of Claudio Parmiggiani (Luzzara, 1943) and Abel Herrero (Havana, 1971) exhibited together for the first time, scheduled to take place at the Galleria delle Carrozze in Palazzo Medici Riccardi. The exhibition, entitled Viaggio di luce (Journey of Light), is curated by Sergio Risaliti with the organization of MUS.E and the Kontainer Association, and brings together the works of two artists of distant origins but united by their mutual poetics and sensitivity to the language of painting.

Thus, a journey that began in 2006, when Abel Herrero decided to ’host’ and curate at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana Claudio Parmiggiani’s installation Silencio a voz alta, the largest environmental Delocazione ever made by the artist, famous for his works of ash and smoke created since 1970, lands at Palazzo Medici Riccardi. That artistic collaboration, crowned in Cuba, is now proposed again in Florence in a more accomplished form and in an unprecedented installation where the works of the two artists converge in a single shared space.

In the Galleria delle Carrozze, four large boats glide toward a distant, unreachable destination; or perhaps they drift away from their point of departure, hoping to land in an unknown, virgin land to begin a new civilization of art. Like memories of a journey, they have almost become shadows of themselves. They travel in stillness. Parmiggiani’s boats carry a special cargo, made of powders of different colors, miraculous, precious materials, the quintessence of a glorious history: pure pigments, the inalienable substance of every pictorial appearance. Red, yellow, blue and green. Colors en route to light, the foundation and origin of the gaze, of astonishment before the miracle of the real that resists the nullifying nothingness.

“I do not have a nihilistic conception of life because I do not even know what life is. I feel that it is a great gift; the gift of being able to observe the world, to observe the eyes of my fellow man, the miracle of being able to walk on this earth,” Claudio Parmiggiani explained.

On the walls are large monochrome canvases of equal chromatic purity signed by Abel Herrero. Seas of a luminous and acid green, of a blinding and nervous yellow, of a blue pregnant with nocturnal depth, of a red like blood and Dionysian nectar, of a black that while it conceals reveals the origin of light. Large agitated surfaces, a sea of color, motionless waves riding one after the other, one on top of the other and facing us like walls saturated with color. Herrero makes a contemporary reappropriation of the classic subject of the seascape, which here becomes a representation of the human condition, “a landscape of massified society and the ideology of produce-consume-produce... Landscape of passive assimilation, of the endurance of the doctrine of alienation and the impossibility of access to contemplation as an increasingly denied psychological category,” Herrero explains.

It is a dialogue where Parmiggiani’s work, installed but strongly marked by pictorial narrative, undergoes a metamorphosis that transforms the horizontal course of the four sculptures, laden with colored pigments, into a vertical catharsis made of large canvases saturated with pure color, pure light.

"The exhibition Journeys of Light," comments Valentina Zucchi, curator of the muiseo at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, "is offered as a true cultural experience: the Galleria delle Carrozze, a unique and majestic space, the backbone of the architecture of Palazzo Medici Riccardi, becomes a physical and metaphorical path, a luminous itinerary through which to reflect on the great themes of existence and our relationship with the world. The works of artists Parmiggiani and Herrero - of great impact not only for the eye but also and above all for thought - stand in this sense as precious viatici, not stages, not guides, not sentinels, but rather elements to contemplate in order to continue, richer, our journey."

“Each of the works exhibited here,” stresses curator Sergio Risaliti, "is like an immersion in painting, in a conflict of the imagination, to the point of being shipwrecked in the sea of light and color, to the point of annulling the passage of time without, however, denying the experience of life, which is movement, which is being in time. These are paintings, images made by subtraction, by levare, in the same way that Parmiggiani’s Delocations are made. Paintings that arise from actions practiced directly on the surface and in contact with colors spread and then acted upon with the hands and fingertips. Getting the principle of representation out of the way, the stubborn search for mimesis, until the point of no return, when, in the instant of the dissolution of reality, it is the thing that reappears, cleansed of all vacuity and superfluity, in its sacred, pregnant and resonant presence; a presence as of icon, of an absolute and therefore inexhaustible immanence that makes no difference between the physical and metaphysical worlds. It is the presence of absence that sheds light on the meaning of painting (pigment for Parmiggiani, monochromes for Herrero) therefore of our very gaze, of our perceiving with open eyes, immersed in the epiphany of light and color. And behind this is the experience of death, the original experience of nothingness that never abandons the artist, the most daring of human beings. This is why Parmiggiani’s boats conceal in their womb piles of ash, the shadow of color that is now reborn from the consumption of light, then the experience of black, the color of the tragic of life, the extreme exhaustion of light and the gaze. The immeasurable desire for infinity and eternity, seems to want to hold together the thoughts of the two artists who, while anchored in immanence, look to transcendence as the supreme value and goal of art. For Herrero and Parmiggiani, there is no other way, no other exercise, than the experience of contemplation, without which there is no possibility of shedding light, of arriving at the truth of reality; a last attempt to reach the invisible and the unlimited before everything disappears. To proceed toward nothingness, toward darkness and emptiness, only to make light of language, to access the poetic truth of the thing, to open a passage toward Lichtung. Parmiggiani and Herrero consider in unison the contemplative immersion in painting as an experience diametrically opposed to any form of communication, as a form of resistance to the dissipation of language into the chatter that Heidegger speaks of."

A catalog with texts by the curator and critical contributions by Andrea Cortellessa and Walter Guadagnini will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. The exhibition opens daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., free admission.

Journey of light: in Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, dialogue between Parmigiani and Herrero

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