Rome hosts solo exhibition of Maurizio Cannavacciuolo, one of Italy's most original postmodern artists

The painting of Maurizio Cannavacciuolo (Naples, 1954), i.e., one of the most original, ironic and complex Italian postmodern artists, is on display at Visionarea ArtSpace in Rome in two unprecedented cycles of works that seem to depict the coexistence of cultures, beliefs, religions, myths, icons of consumption, our time and the history of Man through the centuries and in the folds of modernity. From April 18 to May 18, Visionarea will in fact host Don’t Worry Don’t Worry Be Happy Be Happy, a solo exhibition by Maurizio Cannavacciuolo, curated by Marco Tonelli: for the occasion, the artist presents a cycle of 11 strictly black-and-white paintings, made between 2021 and 2022, on the eclectic, exotic, polysignificant themes, rich in references to cultures and peoples of contemporary and ancient history, Eastern and Western, to languages and iconographies sacred and profane at the same time. The exhibition is organized with the support of the Culture and Art Foundation, an instrumental entity of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale, chaired by Prof. Avv. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele.

The painter’s personal global melting pot becomes in these works a container of symbols, stories, arabesque and optical geometric patterns that invite to be read, interpreted, discovered, as if the viewer should mentally unite the figures in their hidden entanglements and multiple relationships, in an endless hermeneutic kaleidoscope. Maurizio Cannavacciuolo, in fact, has always been focused in his painting in a research that investigates symbols and images of the present, pop icons and cultured quotations drowned in a weave of decorations and superimpositions of images, until all narrative intent is annulled in an essentially ironic approach.

The series of 6 large paintings titled Metempsychosis, Circle Song 1-6, thus combines, in Cannavacciuolo’s classic style, the high and the low, the trivial and the cultured, the historical and the camp, the publicity and the sacred, interweaving images ranging from Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha tattoos to Hindu deities such as Ganesh and Khali, from depictions of bats and technical drawings of automobiles to guitarists Jimi Hendrix, Robert Fripp or Andrés Segovia, from symbols of Yoruba culture, Candomblè and Santeria to magical or therapeutic potions such as Iboga powder, from benign demons such as Saci-Pererê to Hermes Trismegistus. This is not to mention a boundless variety of decorative motifs drawn from various cultures, from Japanese and Soviet textiles to Islamic ornamental garland lattices to musical pentagrams.

In a cycle of five smaller works in the exhibition, all made in 2022 and marked VS (in the sense of Versus or clash), Cannavacciuolo in turn takes up a series stories and dialogues of paintings made in the late 1990s in Cuba, to which he gives now titles that seem like incomprehensible puns or tongue twisters in various idioms, from Spanish Hombre de negocio VS Chulito Lindo to Swedish Kakelmannen VS De tre aständiga männen to English Gimme Five VS The Partially Invisible Breeze.

“Maurizio Cannavacciuolo’s iconographic research,” comments Emmanuele F.M. Emmanuele, "is imbued with that certain humor typical of the theater of the absurd and is characterized by a figuration that lingers between the comic strip, the citation of the advertisements of yesteryear and a vast substratum of sacred and profane symbolism. It is an ironic vision of art that nevertheless, supported by a pictorial style steeped in the Mediterranean tradition but with Middle Eastern influences, reaches to the roots of our culture (and of the encounter with other cultures), inducing reflection. Cannavacciuolo himself defines his works as machine à penser, in that his stated purpose is to induce the viewer to slow down perception and enjoy the narrative, examining every single detail of the work without the conditioning of predetermined concepts. All this, supported by an accurate pictorial style and the use of a classical technique such as oil on canvas."

Maurizio Cannavacciuolo (born in Naples in 1954, lives and works in Rome) abandoned his architectural studies in the mid-1970s and started his artistic activity with the Lucio Amelio Gallery in Naples. Among his solo exhibitions of note are those at Museum Puri Lukisan, Ubud-Bali in 1989; Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome in 1993 and 1997; Studio Guenzani in Milan in 1993 and 1998; Sperone Westwater in New York in 1997 and Fundacion Ludwig de Cuba in Havana in 1997; Asprey-Jacques in London in 1999; Galleria Cardi in Milan in 2000; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Franco Noero in Turin and Francesca Kaufmann in Milan in 2001; the Museu da Republica Rio de Janeiro in 2002; Santiago de Chile and Sprovieri in London in 2003 (and then 2006 and in 2009); the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2004 and 2016; the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead in 2005; the Galleria Pack and Galleria Giovanni Bonelli in Milan in 2019; and Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto in 2021. In 2013, his works appear at Art Rio 2013 at the Progetti gallery in Rio de Janeiro, while in 2016 he is featured in the group show Avanscena at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice and in 2019 he is invited to the 13th Havana Biennial, Matanzas. He has also exhibited in numerous other international contexts including Osaka, London, Brussels, Budapest, Sarajevo, and Frankfurt. Some of his works are kept in the collections of the Farnesina and in the Chamber of Deputies in Rome and in the “Cilea - Quattro giornate” station of the Naples subway.

The exhibition is free admission. For info: www.visionarea.org

Image: Maurizio Cannavacciuolo, Metempsychosis, Circle Song One (2022) - detail

Rome hosts solo exhibition of Maurizio Cannavacciuolo, one of Italy's most original postmodern artists

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