Ponti

Turin – A paper moon suspended in the sky, in the manner of a kite. Harnessed ships without helmsman, drawn like a painting within a painting, and more pink fish, butterflies, paper boats with a precarious balance and a nature that confesses its most urgent truths to the small theater of the canvas.
Suspended between magic and geometry, Francesco Casorati’s lyrical universe is told in an exhibition entitled Francesco Casorati. Between magic and geometryscheduled at Palazzo Lomellini, in Carmagnola (Turin), from 2 September to 13 December.
The most significant stages of the artist’s career are marked by about thirty works, divided into four main “focuses” dedicated by choice only to the pictorial works selected for their emblematic meaning by the curator Elena Pontiggia who, in her introductory essay to the catalog, focuses on the completely original and independent character of Francesco Casorati’s artistic career.

Franesco Casorati, Battle in the woods, 1953

A visionary Babel tower from 1952, a metaphor of war and the inability of men to understand each other, welcomes guests in the first room of Palazzo Lomellini. It is painted by a Francesco Casorati just eighteen years old, yet an already mature, informed, cultured artist.
“To be born in a family where the father (Felice Casorati ed) is one of the greatest artists of the century and his mother is Daphne Maugham, a painter of rare refinement – Elena Pontiggia writes in the catalog – means being born in an Academy of Fine Arts, graduating at the age of four, breathing painting from birth. Francesco will always be stylistically very different from Felice and will undertake a courageously independent path. From him, however, he learns a fundamental concept: the notion of a painting that is not born from the impression, from the sensation, but from the idea ”.

Francesco Casorati, Big window, 1981

So in Babel tower Francesco transforms a dramatic concept such as that of war into a great game that sees as protagonists small stylized men like puppets, reaching towards the sky on shaky stairs, contemplating the red sphere of the moon.
“So the story of a human failure – continues Pontiggia – is subjected to a catharsis that makes it almost similar to a fairy tale, with an expressive procedure that will always return to the artist”.

Blue, on the other hand, is the dominant color in the second room hosting the exhibition, as emerges from the work The Great Sparrow from 1968. Casorati dialogues with Pop Art and also with Surrealism, especially Magritte’s. The blue, on which in the second half of the sixties he set his compositions, represents the color of the distance – as Cézanne said – and at the same time of the dream. “It is a monochrome that removes the image from the banal coloring of everyday life and from the immediate realism, equally banal,” explains the curator.

Francesco Casorati, Game on the floor, 1984

In the room dedicated to works painted in acrylic, housed on the second floor, the subjects are cooled and suspended as in Paper maze of 1984, to give way, in the last room, to the most recent production characterized by the return to oil painting, which allowed Casorati to give free rein to more lyrical chromatic and material vibrations, as in the poetic Seven boats and three fish of 2010.

“For over ten years, between the seventies and eighties – explains Pontiggia – Casorati abandons the oil technique in favor of acrylic, functional to obtain an almost monochromatic and rarefied texture, on which to project the new visual fairy tale with atimbral tones and metaphysical architectural rigor “.
Finally, the triptych marks the last stage of the exhibition Storm of 1986, which proclaims the return to oil painting, to expressive rhythms, to new chromatic vibrations imbued with “poetic unreasonableness”.

What unites the different phases, up to the works of the 2000s, is however the anti-naturalistic character of the whole pictorial representation of Casorati, fairy tale and abstract, mental and at the same time visionary, independent from the artistic currents, yet open to a dialogue sui generis with some of these same currents when not far from his poetics and vision of the world.

Francesco Casorati, Pink fish, 2011, Oil on canvas, 150 x 90 cm

The path invites the observer to grasp the ability of Casorati’s painting to dialogue with contemporary trends without belonging to any of them.

On the other hand, the artist himself confessed that he had always painted “outside any current, naturally paying the price of this isolation”.
In painting, in particular in the construction of triangles and lozenges, there is no lack of echoes of the great masters, from Bruegel to the great totems of de Chirico, in a large time that does not cease with the present, but that feels all ages as contemporary.

The exhibition, with free admission, is open from 2 to 11 September, from Monday to Friday from 20.30 to 23; Saturday and Sunday from 15.30 to 18.30 and from 20.30 to 23. From 12 September to 13 November it can be visited on Thursday and Friday from 15.30 to 18.30, Saturday and Sunday from 10.30 to 12.30 and from 15.30 to 18.30.

Read also:
• Francesco Casorati. Between magic and geometry

Trento – In one of the most evocative historical places in the heart of the Alps, the music “to see” conceived by Brian Eno is pure magic for the eyes.
In Trento, in the evocative setting of Buonconsiglio Castle – the largest and most important monumental complex in the Trentino Alto Adige region – and, a few kilometers away, in the equally refined one of Beseno Castle – the largest fortified structure in Trentino-Alto Adige – as part of the “Brian Eno x Trentino” project, the British composer inaugurated the site-specific multimedia installations Three installations for Buonconsiglio And 77 Million Paintings for Beseno.

“Here, unlike what usually happens – explains Brian Eno – I worked a lot on places and spaces, from a small studio inside the Buonconsiglio Castle, thinking about what I’m interested in investigating, that is the relationship between music and space, and how music can “create a place”. Here, for the first time, I experimented with a new method: the long song, or the encounter between ambient music and voice ”.

Brian Eno | Photo: © Pierluigi Orler

And it is in fact by collecting the suggestions of the spaces of the Castello del Buonconsiglio, symbol of Trento, in the splendid spaces of the Giardini del Magno Palazzo, Cortile dei Leoni and Sala dei Vescovi, that the composer created the site-specific installation Three Installations for Buonconsiglio (visible from 19 August until 6 November), a theory of works conceived on the basis of the spaces that host them, transforming them into caskets of sounds and visions.
Positioned in strategic points of the castle, Eno’s works interact with the surrounding environments, accompanying visitors on a path that, superimposed on the museum exhibition one, offers a synaesthetic listening experience of great charm.

The journey begins on the ground floor of the castle, from the Giardini del Magno Palazzo, with the audio sculpture for the Giardini del Magno Palazzo. Conceived to generate a corner of tranquility in otherwise crowded places, the work, evolving in the course of construction, has gained outdoor spaces.
“The work – explains Eno – is characterized by three pieces that I composed for the occasion and that I“ imprisoned in three terracotta pots ”. The three unpublished pieces, through a cycle of notes and sounds in continuous evolution, project the visitor into an idealized quiet atmosphere.

On the first floor, four loudspeakers placed inside the Cortile dei Leoni diffuse into the space of the hanging garden Music for Courtyard of the Lionsaudio installation with original music composed by the artist specifically for the Buonconsiglio Castle.

Brian Eno, 77 Million Paintings for Beseno, Beseno Castle | Photo: © Pierluigi Orler

Finally, Face To Face is located on the third floor, in the Sala dei Vescovi. The work originates from a small group of photographs of real faces – 18 real people, each immortalized in a single photograph – and stimulates a reflection on the concept of “coming and going” linked to the cycles of life. Thanks to a specially developed software, the image transits slowly from one real face to another, generating a long chain of “new human beings”, in which people who have never existed really cross other human beings, at the rate of 30 per minute. second, giving birth to 36,000 new faces.

Castel Beseno instead becomes the scene of an authentic light painting on the East Walls. 77 Million Paintings for Besenospecific and expansive adaptation of Eno’s most popular artwork, 77 Million Paintings, is a spectacular large-scale audiovisual installation. The imposing walls of the castle become a “canvas” on which the composer, producer, visual artist who became famous as a founding member of the British band Roxy Music, creates the infinite visual combinations of his most famous work. Conceived as “visual music”, 77 Million Paintings it resembles a landscape of sounds and images in continuous evolution, born from Eno’s continuous research on light as an artistic medium and on the aesthetic possibilities offered by generative software. This musical installation undergoes an evolution in front of the public. And the public identifies it as a conventional painting, while aware that the same combination of images will never be repeated again.

Beseno Castle, between Trento and Rovereto

From today, August 19th, until September 10th, eight evening events to present the work to the public will be organized every Friday and Saturday. Under a starry sky, visitors can get lost among millions of combinations, paintings and music.

Read also:
• When art is ambient. Summer in Trento with Brian Eno

Cagliari – The gentleman of fortune with an anarchic spirit, the sailor without a country or a master, the timeless adventurer who juggles the waves of reality without losing the imaginative route of the dream lands in Cagliari driven by the hand of his creator, Hugo Pratt.
The Palazzo di città dedicates to Corto Maltese, the most famous sailor in comics, an exhibition that, until next December 4, will host over 200 works, including watercolors, drawings, tables, retracing the journeys of the famous adventurer through the trait of the master of comic literature.

It was 1967 when Corto Maltese – whose name would belong to the Andalusian argot, “quick of hand” – made his debut on Italian newsstands in the pages of the magazine Sgt. Kirk with the beginning of the saga A ballad of the salty sea, the ante-litteram graphic novel that has transformed, over the years, its protagonist into the cult character of the ninth art. From that moment the gentleman adventurer born from the genius of Hugo Pratt asserts himself in the public imagination as the romantic anti-hero par excellence, the sea wolf who surrounds himself with grandiose figures and petty subjects, hearts pulsating in evil and in the well, idealists and disappointed, all united by being distant from an increasingly flat and dehumanizing reality.

Corto Maltese in Africa, 1987 © Cong SA Switzerland – All rights reserved

Cagliari, surrounded by a sea that is also the perfect port to frame the imaginary route of the protagonist’s seafaring adventures towards the South Seas, passing through Africa, up to the North American border, thus becomes the ideal setting to welcome the worlds liquids by Corto Maltese, and to enclose a Prattian imaginary populated by revolutionaries and rebels, seductive women, African deserts and American prairies, seasoned with those literary references that, from Kenneth Roberts to Fenimore Cooper, contributed to its formation.

The exhibition itinerary entitled Corto Maltese Towards new routes retrace the twentieth century experienced by Pratt and his alter ego Corto. A graphic animation show accompanies visitors through the adventurer’s stories. And so the public will find between The South Seas the helmet of a vintage diving suit and a sculpture-reproduction of a Shardana warrior, offered on loan by the Navy, will cross Africa, where Pratt spent his adolescence, between landscapes and traditions that inspired iconic works such as the four episodes of The Ethiopiansamong women dreamed of or actually met, mythical characters of literature or history such as the painter Tamara de Lempicka, the actress Louise Brooks, the mathematician Hypatia, honored by Pratt in suggestive watercolors.

Corto Maltese towards new routes, Staging | Photo: © Giorgio Marturana

There is the original watercolor representing a Shardana warrior, a character met in the last story written and drawn by Hugo Pratt, Mū the lost citywhere Corto Maltese is in search of the mythical Atlantis in a journey set between 1924 and 1925. In the same story Pratt represents himself inside a diving suit while diving into the abyss.
“It will be interesting – explains the curator Patrizia Zanotti – going through this exhibition in Cagliari, to try to imagine the meeting between Corto Maltese and the celestial navigator Dedalo who builds the first nuraghe, or to see him conversing with a sailor about the navigation techniques of the great Shardana sailing ships. “.

For the entire duration of the exhibition, numerous appointments and collateral events dedicated to comics and illustration are scheduled until December. The tribute to Hugo Pratt will cross the City Palace to reach Cagliari Elmas airport which will host a pictorial contribution by the artist Bob Marongiu and an exhibition entitled Angels in the clouds by the International Center of Comics. The Historical Archive, the Library of Sardinian Studies and the Municipal Library System will also join the exhibition with a bibliographic and documentary selection, representative of the entire municipal heritage, making the materials relating to Pratt’s comic production available to the public.

Corto Maltese towards new routes, Staging | Photo: © Giorgio Marturana

The exhibition can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 to 20. To book, just go to the site of the Civic Museums of Cagliari, Palazzo di città.

Read also:
• Corto Maltese. Towards new routes
• 25 years without Hugo Pratt, the dreamer “cartoonist” who has conquered the ninth art with drawn literature