Mantua, at the Casa del Mantegna the works of three artists inspired by the works of Leonardo da Vinci

As part of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua presents the exhibition SIMILITER IN PICTURA. Around Leonardo from October 20, 2019 to January 6, 2020, featuring works by Luca Bonfanti (Desio, 1973), Enzo Rizzo (Messina, 1958) and Togo (Enzo Migneco; Milan, 1937) inspired by the artistic production and scientific discoveries of the great Tuscan genius.

The exhibition is promoted by the Province of Mantua, under the patronage of the Municipality of Mantua, on a project by Container Lab Association, with the collaboration and coordination of Cristina Renso, Klaus Schnappenberger and Andrea Perfetti.

The exhibition presents through eighty works the reflection, investigation and reinterpretation in a contemporary key around the multifaceted figure of Leonardo by artists Bonfanti, Rizzo and Togo, respectively accompanied by the critical reading of Matteo Galbiati, Alberto Moioli and Elena Pontiggia.

Alongside the paintings are thirty reproductions of Leonardo’s machines made by Giorgio Mascheroni, flanked by video and touch screen installations that integrate observation with educational content, including the video Leonardo narrates “The Last Supper” made by Maurizio Sangalli with Massimiliano Loizzi, Marco Ballerini, Alberto Patrucco and Alfredo Colina. An interactive smartphone application allows visitors to delve into each work on display, then share its contents on social networks with a view to promoting and incentivizing the viralization of culture. Of Leonardo, the three artists in the exhibition each capture a different nuance of their own.

Luca Bonfanti shares, as Galbiati points out, a thirst for discovery, a tireless desire for experimentation and research, “a constant curiosity of having to discover the ’workings’ of the world and, similarly to Leonardo’s attitude, he observes, understands, analyzes, notes.” This leads the artist to move from solid geometries to surreal universes, in a continuous confrontation with color that becomes a “narrative voice.” The pictorial sign, with its marked abstract vocation and ancestry, thus leads the artist toward dreamlike, intimate and poetic atmospheres, at times esoteric, rendered with a dense and vibrant material and a symbolic use of color. Bonfanti, in fact, in abstraction defines “that love for surfaces, for the layering of color, for the continuous reshuffling of the colors that seek to become a metaphor for our feeling”; thus, works are born that refer to water, air and the invisible that touches thought and intuition. Emblematic in this sense is the imposing work The Last Supper (2015, mixed media, acrylic on canvas, 165x300 cm) with a strong symbology, which through the cross, the sprout-sperm, the divine light, the perspective room reveals various sources and suggestions investigated by the artist, ranging from the Bible to the apocryphal Gospels, from the Templar mysteries to theamasonry, from the theory of the Anunnaki, the ancient godsi who came from the sky, to paleo-contact and the origin of life, to the famous Leonardesque work.

Instead, in Enzo Rizzo’s peculiar informal expression, as Moioli reveals, “one enters the world of primordial nature, a reflective path that the artist takes in search of the essence of origins, a journey through colors and the twisted paths of the soul.” Indeed, from his works comes to life a chromatic flow that liberates matter, from which one cannot help but be drawn in and intimately involved, in a circle of emotions and vibrations that connect the canvas to the viewer. Poised between order and chaos are the artist’s works, conceived in the “kairòs,” the sublime and perfect moment of the Greek world in which feelings become vision, inviting the viewer to a profound confrontation with the world and with his own interiority. Thus, the themes of the unity of opposites, the transformation of matter and the becoming of being recur, as well as symbologies related to life and death, birth, creation and metamorphic nature, as in his work In principio era l’Uno (2015, oil and resin on panel, cm 160x100). The work, all played on the use of the color blue in a hue chosen for its strong spiritual vibration, focuses on the theme of the unity of opposites and the One, the first principle of manifestation, in explicit reference to Neoplatonism, which also influenced Leonardo.

In Togo’s paintings Leonardo is paid homage through the themes of flight and water, both of which are reworked with a very personal mark. The former is a memory, an autobiographical desire of the artist cultivated through imagination, which in his works becomes a dream or a sign evoked by a bat wing or a butterfly, as in The First Flight - Homage to Leonardo (2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 160x200 cm), where the idea of the realization of flight, simulated by Leonardo’s studies, emerges within a natural landscape translated into geometric shapes in which the sea is suggested by its white waves. The theme of water, on the other hand, an open form par excellence, becomes a rhythmic element and closed form for the artist, as in the cycle of locks. In The Lock (2019, oil and acrylic on canvas, 100x120 cm, pictured), in fact, the artist tackles a subject dear to Leonardo: the Adda River that flows between landscapes with a geometric cut and in which the course of the canal is the sum of two trapezoids. In these works Togo seems to seek order in the spectacle of nature, far from primal chaos, rendering it with bright colors, proper to a Mediterranean expressionism that communicates the violence of feelings, where blue competes with red to capture light and black becomes the brightest of colors. In Togo, as Pontiggia argues, “the vincian ghost is nothing but a noble pretext for a high, intense, and above all autonomous exercise of painting.”

In order to deepen the discourse proposed by the exhibition regarding Giorgio Mascheroni’s reproductions, guided tours are planned during the show by Alkémica Cooperativa Sociale Onlus, which for the occasion exceptionally presents some scientific instruments of the 18th and 19th centuries inspired precisely by Leonardo’s machines, coming from the Physics Cabinet of the Liceo Virgilio in Mantua. Also open to students and enthusiasts is the didactic-educational workshop Leonardo: the machines, the ideas, the visions, a reading path of Leonardo’s machines aimed at showing their implications on modern thought. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog published by Scripta Maneant with critical texts by Matteo Galbiati, Alberto Moioli and Elena Pontiggia.

Biographical notes . Luca Bonfanti was born in Desio(MB) in 1973. A painter, sculptor, photographer and musician, as a self-taught artist he began his training ’in the workshop’ following the teachings of some of the major contemporary Milanese artists, then he pushes his research to express himself with different languages. He obtains prizes and awards in national and international competitions, and counts over 50 solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad as well as prestigious multi-year projects throughout Italy. In 2014, on the occasion of Expo 2015, he founded Container Lab Association.

Enzo Rizzo was born in Messina in 1958. After traveling to the East and Middle East, he settled in Milan since 1985, a city he left after many years in favor of a quiet village inOltrepò Pavese.

Since 1982 he has exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad, including in Geneva, New York, Messina, Rome, Milan, Prague, Paris, and Taormina. His works are part of important public and private collections.

Enzo Migneco, aka Togo, was born in 1937 in Milan, where he lives and works. Since 1957 he has devoted himself to painting and at the end of the 1960s began his research in the field of engraving. He exhibits with leading curators in important public and private venues in Italy and abroad, including Milan, Ferrara, Wroclaw(Poland), Helsinki(Finland), Taipei as part of the International Biennial of Engraving, Perth(Australia), Messina, Rome, Soncino, Palermo, New York, the European Parliament in Brussels and the 54th Venice Biennale.

Giorgio Mascheroni(Cantù, 1941-2018) made machines that clearly and tangibly explicate the object of his studies focused on nature, man and his creations. He initially reproduced some woodworking machines to scale, then approached Leonardo by studying and being inspired by his many drawings. Each work was handcrafted from reclaimed materials, repurposed to remain as much in the environmental and ecological context as possible.

For all information you can the official website of the Mantegna House.

Mantua, at the Casa del Mantegna the works of three artists inspired by the works of Leonardo da Vinci

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