A passionate, determined and equally enlightened benefactor
gladly donated his collection.
This is not just a collection of works of high artistic
and aesthetic value. It is above all testimony to the
human endeavour and the poetic reach that the artists
represented here knew how to transmit through their
creativity.
We live in a society which becomes daily ever more prosaic
because fantasy and imagination are now nourished by
a cultural industry with a logic based on the profit
motive, economic gain considered to outweigh any other
value system. From cinema to television, from the world
of publishing to fashion, from newspaper and magazine
journalism to artfully engineered opinions fed to us
about the framework of our reality, this manufactured
and only apparently democratic logic reduces shared
aesthetic sensibility to the lowest common denominator.
From this levelling down we can already see the outline
of the model being, dubbed by Marcuse one-dimensional
man. This is a man who wants and knows how to
use sophisticated electronic gadgets but who is at the
same time a new barbarian, incapable of understanding
the secret suggestion of poetry, the emotional sense
of a complex image, and the depths of his own true feelings.
The art world is not free from this process. But, as
everywhere, we have generous and splendid exceptions
to the rule. There are artists who work neither for
the fashion of the moment nor for success at all costs,
but who are driven by their own search for truth to
communicate and share through their images.
It was the intention to include the work of such artists
which determined the selection of exhibits for the museum.
The truth and human complexity of the artists represented
here, and their anguished, contradictory, and problematic
poetical statements, the result of impassioned existential
reflection, come together to illuminate an era in which
unheard of levels of anxiety, brought about by political
upheaval
and economic crises, falling stocks and dulled human
consciousness, leave little space for poetry and beauty.
It is in this perspective that the collection, destined
to be a permanent exhibition open to all, assumes a
precise flavour. To believe in art, in its capacity
to penetrate and to rethink radically the reality that
surrounds us, in fact signifies holding open the door
to the most worthy and responsible
human achievement and moral standpoint, thus laying
the foundations for a different human consciousness
leading to mankinds betterment. In choosing the
artists, the aim was to remain free of conditioning
and prejudice, and to look only for quality and intensity
of talent and above all
for intrinsic sincerity of intent. These artists represent
a special sample of the linguistic panorama today present
in Italy. From the most explicitly figurative to the
most expansive formal or abstract images, these most
diverse forms of expression are inter-related by a shared
testimony. These
artists have all sought to express themselves in a vernacular
that does not bow to established trends, that develops
its own feeling, and its own motion and intuition without
following a pre-determined path.
There in a nutshell is the motive underlying the selection
of the works. It is the expression of a wish to testify
to the validity of judgements on material objects and
on life. What unites these works is an affirmation of
independence, an aspiration to show in its entirety
creative individuality,
without compromise and without any lowering of standards.
I am also convinced that within the limits that the
collection has to impose on itself, the direction taken
is the right one, a direction that is worth
taking because it is not a priori circumscribed by prevailing
selection methods which, as I said, are today strongly
influenced by cultural fashion and the taste of an elitist
market.
It is the sincere artists who are the standard bearers
of a great and precious potential for an authentic freedom
of creativity. The system that surrounds them, which
we can with justifiable cynicism refer to as the
Art factory, (to quote Argan) demonstrates itself
to be ever more capable of trivial neutralisation, of
subtle circumventions, and of creeping ghettoisation.
The more one talks of art today, the less one talks
of the truth of the artists. Painting and sculpture
become the real dead language, according
to the tragic aphorism of Martini, when it is not their
burden of humanity and true feelings which are sought
and heard but their adhesion to the rules of the market
and prevailing trends. These are the ideas on art which
really count today while the objects themselves, with
their burden of emotion and judgement that artists stimulate
in their work, remain definitively out of the circuit.
It seems they are of no interest to anyone, and least
of all to the majority of art critics.
But this is not to say that all Italian artists today
sign up to the formula of vulgar opportunism. Thus,
the diversity and inflections, the linguistic and thematic
traditions that many of them draw upon are in many cases
the sign of a freedom that is in the first place ethical.
And in fact such a freedom, encountered on a well thought
out common ground, makes this collection interesting
and stimulating. At the heart of the quest it sums up,
one can discover, like a permanent centre of gravity,
the sensitive presence of reality and of its lyrical
representation, the presence of man and of his better
sentiments.
That is, once again, the underlying sense we wished
to give to this collection. It is an opportunity to
know and to appreciate not this or that exclusive language,
not this or that conformity to the latest ism,
but the best talents, studies which stand out for truth,
for sincerity, for emotional power and expression.
It is also an extraordinary opportunity for comparison
and learning. The confines of the world are today ever
wider, more evanescent. Yet in this era in which technology
and communication allow for a global village,
as McLuhan called it, we are seeing an upsurge of exaggerated
localism, nationalism, and parochialism, and anachronistic
attempts at isolationism. It is on this very ground
that artistic culture and the aesthetics of the imagination
can perform an important uniting role through exchange,
curiosity and mutual respect.
It is, in short, from the rich differences in the accents
of art that there surfaces the possibility of an operative
community and effective perception: that the honed scalpels
of sculpted and painted images may better penetrate
the opaque surface of phenomenal reality to draw out
the underlying existential and spiritual values and
emotions implied.
Nicola Cesari
Other presentation of :
- Vito De Grisantis
- Monsignor
Giuseppe Stendardo
- Nicola Cesari
- Vito Mele
- Giorgio Seveso
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