Extended horizons. From Felice Casorati to Vanessa Beecroft
Overview by Giorgio Cortenova
The times we are living in do not seem a continuation of what went before, but nor do they seem an alternative to it or to have a strong autonomy with respect to it. Our age is formed above all by the categories of time which, in fact, is its strongest reference point. Post-modern... Post-ideological... these are definitions referring, not so much to the types of things we are dealing with, as much to the fact of simply coming after.
After history? Probably so. If by 'history' we mean a series of connected actions/reactions which correlate according to dialectic principles based on differences or on the identities and developments resulting from them, then we are entitled to say that history has ended and that what seems to us to be history is only the anomalous echo of a phenomenon that is by now extinct.
Of course, even man without an identity is part of human concerns, but it is also true that today he acts when history, linking up this and that, has finished its cycle of lost illusions and their relative aims.
Globalisation of languages and communications is quite another thing (or another threat?) with regard to mass production and its output. Twenty-first century man has, for the moment, stopped trying to define the 'sense' of things. Perhaps he no longer even expects any 'sense' to result from the dust that things leave and from the shattered reality that they are involved in. 'Sense' will arise, if and when it arises. But in the meantime things 'are' in their dissipated relativity, and dialectic seems to be wiped out by the fury of the 'perfect tempest', in the frank encounter between the before and after, between the 'pre' and the 'post'.
After the arrival of the digital age, after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the crisis of ideologies, modernity too has become history. And after modernity even the future, the legendary, glorious future, has simply or perhaps above all become an 'after' pregnant with questions, of suspected betrayals, of fascinating instants.
Art turns to this hyper-extended present, to this constricted future, this past that is only a 'before' like thought without memory and parsimonious with dreams.
This is the panorama which provides the setting for the denunciations of the generations making their appearance 'after history' or when history was 'about to finish'. It is characterised by an endless interweaving of languages and expressive means. And here we are dealing with masterpieces with a great emotive and cultural impact, ones that do not refer back to history but explore it in every way as can only be done if a terrain has an 'archaeological' and remote form.
The recent acquisitions of the gallery are directed at 'recording' messages from artists who denounce the hypocrisy and violence of our times, and underline repressed hopes and dreams: we are dealing with a trend that already today represents a precise and exhaustive reference for international art.
However, the collection of works is not restricted to the period in which we live. It also refers to what lies behind us, to 'History', and to this battered yet lively 'trope', this typology which is part of the chromosomes of individuals and society.
Our civic collection is certainly not lacking in masterpieces, both of the 19th and the 20th centuries. For this show we have decided to begin our itinerary at the crossover point of the two centuries when visual certainties were upset and visions of the spirit and the disturbances of the psyche were reinforced.
We then move on to the Italian masters active between the two wars, and then to the Fronte Nuovo movement and to post-war European abstract expressionism. The division into sections is logical and chronological, as is also the case both in our thoughts and experience. On the other hand, if we can act in the present and foresee the future, our awareness of the past is manifested only by looking back and, if necessary, by finding today the more or less vital traces of what has been and what continues to be.