Mart in Rovereto dedicates an anthological exhibition to Italo Cremona, the independent surrealist of the 20th century

From September 28, 2024 to March 9, 2025, the Mart in Rovereto will dedicate an anthological exhibition to Italo Cremona (Cozzo, 1905 - Turin, 1979) that explores his entire artistic production and creative universe. Curated by Giorgina Bertolino, Daniela Ferrari and Elena Volpato, the exhibition Italo Cremona. Everything Else is Deep Night is produced in collaboration with GAM in Turin, which hosted the first stage of the exhibition project from April 24 to September 8, 2024, and Fondazione Torino Musei.

One of the central themes of Cremona’s painting is the nocturnal, an expressive and existential condition that evokes dreams, nightmares, apparitions and fantastic visions. The phrase “All the rest is deep night,” with which Cremona concluded one of his articles for the Acetylene column in Roberto Longhi’s magazine Paragone, inspires the title of the exhibition.

A painter and writer, a multifaceted and eccentric intellectual, Cremona has explored in his paintings and writings the “Shadow Zone,” a concept from his book of the same name published by Einaudi. This dark space is traversed by flashes of light, such as the glow of an acetylene lamp or the trail of a shooting star, as described in his dystopian novel The Comet’s Tail.

The exhibition traces Cremona’s entire painting career, from his youthful works of the 1920s to those of the first half of the 1970s. From his still lifes, close to the atmospheres of Magic Realism, to the dreamlike visions of the “independent surrealist,” as Cremona liked to call himself, the exhibition brings together about one hundred paintings, as well as drawings and engravings, documenting the artist’s great originality and pictorial quality. Starting with central works from the Mart’s collections, such as Composizione con lanterna (1926) and La Libra (1929), and from GAM, such as theSelf-Portrait in the Studio (1927), Metamorphosis (1936-1937) and Winter (1939-1940), the anthological exhibition presents loans from prestigious museums and public collections, including the Musei Civici “Luigi Barni” in Vigevano, the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and the Musei Reali - Galleria Sabauda in Turin. In addition, numerous works come from private collections and institutions such as the Casa Mollino Museum, the Salvo Archive, and the Bottari Lattes Collection.

The exhibition itinerary follows the chronological evolution of Cremona’s oeuvre, highlighting recurring and iconographic themes that the artist explored time and again. One section is devoted to his fascination with the fantastic, the grotesque and the surreal, with paintings in which the brushstroke seems to become increasingly exact and sharp the more it ventures into the expression of the bizarre. In the room of facades, the focus shifts to Turin’s architecture: seemingly deserted of all human presence, painted like wings of a secret city theater, the silent facades of buildings and houses always hint at a further space.

The exhibition also delves into the representation of nudes, where Cremona combines academic exercise with a visionary production of epiphanies, apparitions of otherness, small hallucinations that no longer distinguish the reality of the model’s body from the pictorial segmentation of its details. Alternating dreamlike images, drawings and etchings with his strong pictorial plasticity, from the 1920s and 1930s to the 1950s, the exhibition highlights the topicality of Cremona’s work, an eccentric and irregular figure of the 20th century, close to other intellectuals in Turin such as Carlo Mollino and Carol Rama.

Based on the study and reinterpretation of documentary materials, preserved in the Italo Cremona Fund at the Turin State Archives and in private archives, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Allemandi, with essays by the curators and a rich set of images.

For info: https://www.mart.tn.it/

Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Mart in Rovereto dedicates an anthological exhibition to Italo Cremona, the independent surrealist of the 20th century

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