Maria Lai's artist's nativity scenes on display at Certosa di San Martino

From December 16, 2022 to March 19, 2023, the Sala della Meridiana of the Charterhouse and Museum of San Martino, right next to the nativity section that brings together the treasures of the Neapolitan tradition, will host, on the occasion of the Christmas holidays, an exhibition of cribs by Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013), entitled Un Filo nella Notte, curated by Marta Ragozzino. A small exhibition realized in collaboration with theMaria Lai Archive and Foundation dedicated to the artist cribs of one of the Italian protagonists of the second half of the 20th century in the artistic field, to whom the Neapolitan city has never dedicated a solo exhibition.

Promoted by the Campania Regional Museums Directorate, the exhibition showcases some of the most significant and original artist’s nativities made by Maria Lai during her long career, starting in the mid-1950s, when the artist gave shape to the first compositions dedicated to the Nativity in jute and terracotta. The artist was a young pupil of Arturo Martini, and the nativity scene, in its various declinations, always characterized by essentiality and a profound reflection on emptiness and absence, has been among the Sardinian artist’s central themes.

Fundamental is the use of simple, poor materials, sometimes taken from everyday life, such as jute or terracotta in the early nativities, but also stones, wood, bread, on which the artist intervenes, composing and decomposing even already created nativities, and recovering their figures in new, and often even more essential, compositions. Materials always sewn, or woven, because art is connection and connection. Art activates dialogue, allows for relationship. Art, for Maria Lai, is not in the object, in the physicality of the work, in the characters of the crib, but in the elsewhere, in the reality behind appearance, in the void that transcends the physical dimension.

With essential characters, often traced back to almost geometric figures, out of caves or huts, always under the vault of the starry sky, attracted and oriented by a thread in the night, which is that of the comet star (which becomes an ear of corn), Maria Lai’s nativities, and the books of prophecies, sewn, bound and woven with threads, or the “calligraphy” of the 2000 Christmases of War, bring the sacred back into the life of each of us.

The exhibition presents thirteen works from the collections of the Maria Lai Archive and Foundation and is a full part of the programming of the San Martino Museum, which is much visited during the holiday season precisely because of its nativity section.

On the occasion of the evening opening, Friday, Dec. 16 and Saturday, Dec. 17, the Carthusian Monastery and Museum of San Martino will extend its opening hours from 5 to 8 p.m., with last admission at the ticket office at 7 p.m.

Image: Maria Lai, Nativity, detail (1956 - 2006; wood, terracotta, enamel, paint, 50 x 200 x 100 approx.) Photo by Serge Domingie. Courtesy of the Maria Lai Archive, Siae 2022)

Maria Lai's artist's nativity scenes on display at Certosa di San Martino

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