New York, the quintessential example of how the world’s metropolises travel at the speed of light and the memories of the past, while having different matrices, in the realities of contemporary blend into common denominators. The exhibition Urban Memories. NY 1942-2012, curated by Lorenzo Canova, offers the public three artists, three techniques and three cycles of works that give life to an articulated mechanism made of three distinct temporalities, paradoxically different and synchronic, of convergent and distant spaces, of the many possible methods to discover the secret form of a multiple and complex city, of the hidden and enigmatic layout of a metropolis that links the past and present in its dynamic kaleidoscope of images, objects and life leaning swirling toward the future. The exhibition kicks off with an album of black-and-white photos, dated 1940s, of an artist whose name will never be known, discovered by chance and entered into the collection of Stefano and Silvia Lucchini, which sum up the eternal charm of New York City, from the far south of Manhattan to the north beyond Central Park. Seventy years later, two artists
contemporaries, Angelo Bucarelli and Jonathan Guaitamacchi, retrace the steps of those ancient originals with eight works each.
Bucarelli, performing the same ’42 shots with meticulous precision, investigates time and its acceleration, the meteorological time that makes its revolution in just eight days, the time of life that locks human beings into a constant race populated by changing buildings, cars whizzing by and compulsive tourist’s quick snapshots. Jonathan Guaitamacchi, who has been has been working on the iconography of the urban landscape, instead takes a photographic cue and declines it into painting, his annotations contouring the main images like thoughts struggling to give shape a definitive reflection.
The exhibition is organized by Galleria Russo at the exhibition spaces of the historic Biblioteca Angelica, under the patronage of the Embassy of the United States of America and in collaboration with Euro Forum Communication.
