Maria Lai and Jorge Eielson. At the MAN in Nuoro, an exhibition on their artistic and emotional bond

The MAN Museum in Nuoro presents from July 14 to September 17, 2023 the exhibition Maria Lai and Jorge Eielson. 100 thousand stars, curated by Elisabetta Masala, from an idea by Marina Affanni and Chiara Gatti, in collaboration with Archivio Maria Lai, Centro Studi Jorge Eielson Firenze, Archivio Jorge Eielson Saronno.

This is the first institutional exhibition dedicated to the profound intellectual and emotional dialogue that linked Maria Lai to Peruvian artist Jorge Eielson. Against the backdrop of a rural Sardinia, the two artists intertwine their private and expressive histories; they share reflections on the world and aesthetics, sign four-handed works, and mutually dedicate words and images to each other. Jorge’s poems suggest to Maria new tales for her threads. Maria’s Sardinia, its archaic past, its fairies, the Mediterranean, in turn inspire Jorge’s verses and those knots of cloth a legacy of a South American culture that he brings with him to the island. Eielson had left Peru in 1948 and lived in Paris and Switzerland before settling in Italy in 1951. In Bari Sardo, his life intertwined with that of another local artist, Michele Mulas, witnessing a friendship that developed between the 1980s and 1990s.

“Points of contact in their work, after all, were not lacking,” writes Elena Pontiggia. “Lai and Eielson both dialogued with that direction of research in contemporary art that uses the canvas of the painting as a material, indeed they were among its protagonists. It is a direction of research that in Italy goes from Burri’s Sacchi to Scarpitta’s ”bandages,“ from Piero Manzoni’s kaolin-soaked canvases to Castellani’s and Bonalumi’s shaped canvases, to Dadamaino’s Volumi and the works of Simeti, Mario Surbone and others. Its origins thus go back to the informal especially of the 1950s and find a new declination at the end of the decade with the Azimut group. The two seasons, however, have antithetical ideals: in Burri and Scarpitta the canvas is essentially matter; in Manzoni and his companions it is, so to speak, antimatter, it is an aspect of that aspiration to silence that runs through their work and wants to overcome the physicality and the cry of informal. Eielson also makes use of the canvas, but with other intentions still. In his works the knot, or quipo, the ancient sign of the Incas, which symbolizes a center of cosmic energy and at the same time the prime, almost molecular core of every being, has a fundamental value. Already in the Assemblages Eielson had used textiles, which suggested to him an existential reflection. ’It came to me spontaneously to include [in the work] garments that [...] possessed a precise existential reality. And there are whole series of shirts, blue-jeans, jackets and pants, women’s dresses, evening dresses, shoes, socks, ties, accessories of all kinds. [...] I treated these garments in every possible way: torn, burned, cut, twisted and finally knotted,’ the artist recounted.”

The exhibition project thus presents about sixty works by Maria Lai and Jorge Eielson, some of them previously unpublished and shown to the public for the first time, found in private collections as well as from the historical archives of both authors. The exhibition unfolds through a two-voice narrative featuring paintings, canvases, sculptures and technical experiments by Lai and Eielson in sections: landscape, poetry, stars, geographies, with the intention of restoring the harmony of a common feeling and small “knots” that connect in subtrack the anthropological reasons for the work of both, between the island’s past and that of the native Peruvians.

For info: www.museoman.it

Image: Jorge Eielson, Alphabet, detail (1973-2001; private collection). Photo by Kate Glicksberg

Maria Lai and Jorge Eielson. At the MAN in Nuoro, an exhibition on their artistic and emotional bond

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