Prato, Antonello Ghezzi duo makes fairy tales concrete with The Pirate Island project

From June 24 to Sept. 4, in Prato, the outdoor spaces of Villa Rospigliosi, a historic 18th-century mansion, become a place of imagination with the exhibition intervention L’isola dei pirati by the duo Antonello Ghezzi, formed by Nadia Antonello (Cittadella, 1985) and Paolo Ghezzi (Bologna, 1980), curated by Riccardo Farinelli, conceived and designed for ChorAsis, a contemporary art cultural project that aims to reflect on the meaning of the persistence of the past in the present, making available to the invited artists some of the villa’s historic rooms and its park-garden. The duo comes to Prato to reaffirm and share the desire and the right to want to dream.

Pirate Island for Villa Rospigliosi exalts, right from its title, the dimension of fairy tale and imagination as a founding component of that parallel reality that for Antonello Ghezzi is art. The two artists first provide, to this end, a concrete example with their own tale which, starting from a detail such as the scent, the shape, the color of the lemons, develops a story that progressively unfolds autonomously. The story told by the artists and their blue installations (the infinite romantic color of imagination), placed in the spaces facing the villa, are meant to stimulate and urge the visitor to do the same: to find their own cues to build other possible individual stories where reality and imagination can coexist together. The public, if they wish, can take up this invitation to dream, perhaps climb that ladder from where it is natural to think through unusual points of view.

The artists write: “There is a beautiful villa in Prato, it is called Villa Rospigliosi, you get to it from a wonderful cypress avenue, it has a large lawn in front of it, behind it a forest and next to it a garden full of fragrant lemons .....nel planning an artistic intervention in the gardens of the historic villa we wanted to immerse ourselves in all that beauty and, a little uncomfortable with its long and important history, we decided to invent a new one.... We went very far in time and space because imagination and fantasy have no boundaries... hours telling this story, changing it... until our eyes could see the succession of characters, their stories, their emotions, and the elements left at the villa, present and visible, evidence that what is being told is true ... you understand, in the confines of the game, in the universe of art ... . The villa continues its history that changes and changes with the people who live there and pass through there, each with his own story, each free to live it and tell it as he wishes. It doesn’t matter if the story we have written is true or false, if there is pirate treasure under the big cross or it is hidden a little further away, the important thing is that this and all the other stories exist and that we can follow the trail of the scent of lemons, to find our way home.”

The Island of Pirates is intended to be a poetic art project, with joyful tones and deliberately childlike traits, presented with that spontaneous lightness and naiveté that characterizes Antonello Ghezzi’s work, just as it is characterized by a kind of contagious optimism. Antonello Ghezzi’s attempt is to make tangible fairy tales, stories that live on the border between reality and imagination, of emotions and feelings. Stories that, placed in the present, give hope, make us feel good, making possible the things we like but usually belong to fairy tales.

Curator Riccardo Farinelli writes: “It seems that Antonello Ghezzi have conceived and fine-tuned a narrative machine capable of moving projectually in four moves, where the visitor is constantly seen as an active and moving protagonist. Move No. 1 (Above the background noise): Coming out of the cypress avenue, the visitor is surprised by the sight, in the lawn facing the facade of the villa, of a wooden reredos that is completely ultramarine blue, the color of fantasy and imagination. He approaches it, notices a staircase, climbs its steps. On the platform he finds a desk and chair, also ultramarine blue. Papers and pens on the desk look almost like an invitation to write something. What? He looks up, the elevated vantage point allowing him to see more, beyond the tip of the cypress trees. Move #2 (In plain sight): A large red X is now clearly visible on the lawn. What will it mean? The visitor sits down. Time passes. He begins to write. Finished, he descends again. Move No. 3 (Ladder to fetch clouds): Having crossed the threshold of a wide doorway, one enters a large room on whose back wall rests a wooden ladder, which continues painted on the wall, above which is a small cloud, also painted. The presence, again, of blue, the title of the installation and the very structure of the whole, reaffirms the sense and meaning to be given to the whole experience, already amply enunciated by the reredos in the meadow. Move No. 4 (Pirate Island): On the wall to the right is a sofa, large and comfortable. It is a clear invitation to sit down, take some time and, perhaps, in the meantime observe the many drawings on the opposite wall, which seem to depict a story that seems to be about lemons and pirates, just like the one that you can listen to through headphones or read on the papers leaning next to it.”

The Bologna-based duo formed by Nadia Antonello and Paolo Ghezzi, whose art work combines with social work, is now one of the most interesting collectives on the Italian scene with projects that have seen them exhibit in many parts of the world and among a wide variety of institutions. Their research sets as a generative and focal point the magical lightness, a joyful way of romantic feelings, solidarity, hopes, thoughts aimed at the beautiful, the utopian character of a better society where human relationship is a value to be cultivated and cherished, universality, dreams and a always looking up where borders do not exist.

Nadia Antonello and Paolo Ghezzi trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and founded the duo Antonello Ghezzi in 2009. Their installations and performances are in numerous private collections and have been exhibited in Italian and international contexts including: Kunsthall in Bergen, Beit Beirut, Wayfarers in Brooklyn, New York, European Parliament in Brussels, Gnration in Braga, Portugal, Museo per la Memoria di Ustica in Bologna, Miasto Ogródowice in Katowice, Palazzina dei Bagni Misteriosi in Milan, Artbab Manama in Bahrain, Sound Design Festival in Hamamatsu, Japan, Italian Cultural Institute in Athens, Usina del Arte in Buenos Aires, Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, Museo di Villa Croce in Genoa, Moscow Biennale, Pitti Uomo in Florence, Sarajevo Winter Festival, Blik Opener in Delft, Arsenale in Verona, and CIFF in Copenhagen.

Image: Antonello Ghezzi, Under everyone’s eyes.

Prato, Antonello Ghezzi duo makes fairy tales concrete with The Pirate Island project

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