Labirinto della Masone hosts exhibition on Ugo Celada da Virgilio

Although isolated from the circuit of contemporary twentieth-century art, and for this reason not included in the critical debate of the time, Ugo Celada da Virgilio (Cerese, 1895 - Varese, 1995) was able to cross the last century by informing himself about what was happening, appropriating the references of past figurative culture and coeval to him and reworking them through the filter of his style, which he kept intact and constant throughout his life. The exhibition Ugo Celada da Virgilio. Ancient and Modern Enigma curated by Cristian Valenti, scheduled at the Labirinto della Masone in Fontanellato from May 7 to September 17, 2023, aims to tell the story of the Lombard artist.

The year 1931 is a watershed in the painter’s career. It is the year of his bitter stance against Margherita Sarfatti’s Movimento del Novecento, defined as an overpowering political-commercial formation and accused of having codified a State Art. From then on for Celada began a path toward isolation that would lead him to be forgotten. It is only in 1985 that his figure is rediscovered, thanks to Flavio Caroli, who dedicates an illuminating essay to him that will not, however, be followed up in subsequent anthologies and exhibitions devoted to early 20th-century art.

The exhibition Ugo Celada da Virgilio. Ancient and Modern Enigma aims precisely to relocate the artist within the cultural context of his time, proposing unprecedented dialogues with the works of other artists, his contemporaries and old masters, who well exemplify how Celada was informed about the world around him and knew how to look at others without losing his own characterizing elements. To tell this story, the Labirinto della Masone, also home to Franco Maria Ricci’s publishing house, seemed ideal to the organizers: two aesthetics, Celada’s and Ricci’s, that speak the common language of beauty, also evidenced by the portrait of the artist already in the Labirinto’s collections, an elegant, spectacled gentleman created with extreme detail, almost hyperrealist.

The exhibition displays about fifty works by Celada and other artists compared with him, mostly from private collections. The itinerary is developed in three rooms that trace the genres tackled by the painter: family affections, nudes, portraits and still lifes.

The first room is dedicated to the years of training and the creation of a personal style, especially focused on the sphere of family affections, which lend themselves well to restore the intimate dimension of the painting of magic realism; the second room focuses on the representation of the human figure and then portraiture; lastly, one encounters still lifes, much loved for the infinite possibilities of rendering details, and landscapes en plein air, not very numerous in the artist’s corpus, but which help to restore an image of a versatile painter, diversified in styles and genres.

Ugo Celada was born in 1895 in Cerese, in the province of Mantua, now called Borgo Virgilio, a place-name by which he would sign his works, referring to the tradition of the old masters who were identified according to their place of origin: for him this was a programmatic declaration of poetics and a choice of field in the debate of the 1920s between Historical Avant-gardes and Return to Order. From a very young age he showed a marked artistic predisposition, going so far as to train at the Brera Academy in Milan. In the 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Venice Art Biennials and at the Permanente in Milan and was included in the contemporary art circuit, from which, however, he later distanced himself permanently.

Émile Bernard calls Celada the best Italian artist of his time, referring to the 1926 reclining nude that is now missing, the Lost Masterpiece, which represents the pinnacle of his early success. His life would be a very long one, exactly 100 years, he died of 1995 traversing the whole of the short century, from the agrarian world to the threshold of the digital revolution, and of all this in his paintings there is no trace, it seems that nothing manages to upset him, an example of resilience ante litteram.

Celada’s art is classical, a pure expression of the realism that precisely in the early 1900s had its heyday. A debtor to the Lombard figurative tradition, he sought in everything a canon of beauty, not real beauty but idealistic representations. He always favored an objectification of the subjects to better bring out the quality of painting, in its more manual and artisanal side, and this is evident in the portraits, which all seem to be the same, without psychological connotations, although they are all different. Unprecedented dialogues and comparisons are encountered in each room: nudes and female figures are juxtaposed with canvases by Archimede Bresciani da Gazoldo, also from Mantua and ideally considered Celada’s master, and Virgilio Guidi, who was very active as a realist artist in the 1920s and 1930s and whom he certainly had the opportunity to meet.

The itinerary includes a Penitent Magdalene by Francesco Hayez from the permanent collection of Franco Maria Ricci, which, when juxtaposed with Celada’s female nudes, brings out their neoclassical components, the intense colors of the draperies embracing the large surfaces of realistically rendered skin. Prominent among the portraits are canvases by Cagnaccio di Sampietro, a painter who shared a certain sensibility with Celada and whom the Mantuan certainly knew and appreciated, following his example several times. There is no shortage of more explicit references: in a self-portrait from the 1930s, Celada depicts himself in a three-quarter view, with a paintbrush in his hand and a mannequin resting on the table in a blatant homage to Giorgio De Chirico, whom he considered the only one of his contemporaries who had mastered the tools of art. Giorgio Morandi is also present in the exhibition, in a comparison based on the similarity and difference in the approach to being an artist of the two: although they both represented still lifes with a similar setting, Morandi sought the essence of things, while Celada tends toward a representation of things truer than the real thing, which is not meant to be a photographic reality, rather a formal sublimation.

The exhibition itinerary will also be enriched by a series of objects-especially vases-that recall those that appear in Celada’s paintings and that echo the style of Venini, Zecchi, Barovier, Scarpa, and Seguso, demonstrating how important the harmony of form was to the constant search for beauty undertaken by the artist.

A new volume for FMR editions dedicated to the artist with an introduction by Professor Valerio Terraroli will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Info: 0521827081- Mail: labirinto@francomariaricci.com

From April 22 to June 25, 2023, a shuttle service will run every Saturday and Sunday from Fidenza train station, specifically from Foro Boario on Via Cornini Malpeli, to the Labyrinth. With several daily runs to and from the station, the service costs €7 including round-trip fares and can be purchased at www.labirintodifrancomariaricci.it in the “Ticket Office” menu - “Shuttle Service” section at the bottom of the page. The service is reserved for customers and visitors to the Masone Labyrinth, and therefore at the same time as the shuttle ticket, it is mandatory to purchase, always online, the entrance ticket to the Labyrinth for the same day.

“Beyond the quality, irrefutable, of his painting, what emerges in Celada da Virgilio, is the non-negligible value of his experience; the role (he had) as a witness in the evolution of the artistic events of the 20th century, in turn engaged in the search for his own way of art, to respond to the great changes and resist, to continue living and painting.” says exhibition curator Cristian Valenti, “His work and his attitude constitute an important piece for understanding the richness of the artistic context of the 20th century, beyond the simplification of historiographical reconstructions organized only by progressive ’moments of rupture’ and thus at the expense of research that instead pursues continuity.”

Labirinto della Masone hosts exhibition on Ugo Celada da Virgilio

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