with a critical essay by Laura Cherubini
Italian art, Laura Cherubini notes in the introduction, seems to revolve entirely around painting. Why? Because painting – be it expressionist, abstract, material, informal – is always rooted in reality, and no people like the Italians have such a clear, vivid perception of reality. Dante without Giotto would be unthinkable, he is a visionary. De Sanctis himself in his literary history highlights the adherence of Italian thought and art to reality.
Afro’s spring painting, Turcato’s cosmic in the everyday, Accardi’s nature itself as it grows, Sanfilippo’s dispersed particles aspiring to the sky, Pascali’s fragmented and magnified female body, Rotella and Twombly’s ‘new objectivity’, Mauri who assumes performance as the evolution of the painting, Boetti’s embroideries with the humble biros, Angeli’s contact with the ‘street’, and then Festa, Gilardi, Baruchello, and again in Fontana and Leoncillo (where painting intertwines with sculpture). .. they all seek – following poetics that are also very different from each other – an increasingly elusive, miniaturised, decomposed, natural or artificial reality, and the light hidden within this reality.
