At Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Fuori. Quadriennale d’Arte 2020, confirms its role of pillar for contemporary artistic research. This edition is presented with strength and personality, documenting over sixty years of the Italian artistic scene through a transgenerational and multidisciplinary discourse. According to the curators Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, this orientation aims to reflect three main lines of research, focused on investigating the relationship between art and power through the image of the Palazzo, of the primary and original impulse of artistic making through Desire, and the artistic inclination to embrace one’s obsessions according to an idea Incommensurable. It follows an exhibition path wisely orchestrated with notable counterpoints, centered on a reflection on erotic desire as the foundation of artistic research, further translated into the power of seduction and re-enchantment of art, according to a post-media language that crosses arts visuals, fashion, theater, dance, film, architecture and design.

Strong is the female presence, but not exclusive. It translates more widely into a question of gender-roles by considering how art is the privileged language ​​to articulate different nuances of thought, rich in persuasive and glam tones, as suggested by the work of Cinzia Ruggieri, Stivali Italia (1986) such as a standard-bearer of modern style and thought. On this tone, the two sections adjacent to the main hall are here articulated.

On the one hand, the exhibition itinerary starts from a reflection on the body and evolves through an investigation that leads towards the immaterial and the incommensurable such as in the multi-media assemblage Rest (2020) by Michele Rizzo, which embraces sculpture, performance and new technologies. This is followed by a series of references and citations that articulate through the work of Giulia Crispiani, a work conceived at the time of the pandemic, through a reflection on writing as a practice concerned with the construction of a collective body. This is confirmed by Chiara Camoni’s sculptures, Kabira and Untitled (Una Tenda) (2019) where a questioning of the power of relations is at the basis of her thought and her appearing of images. Incommensurable is also the writing of Raffaella Naldi Rossano, in the conceptual work A Liquid Confession (2019) almost immersed in the background of the ancestral and atavistic landscape of Diego Gualandris. A reflection that in the end, returns to the idea of ​​the body in the forest of bronze, wood and stoneware sculptures, by Lydia Sivestri, where the artist replaces the traditional concern for composition with the power of erotic desire, sublimated by abstraction.

Symmetrically, a second section articulates that interdisciplinary dialogue between visual arts, theater, performance, and costume. From the cabinets of Maurizio Vetrugno, an erotic drive emerges and is linked to the collection of valuable objects and iconic images, supported by a classification informed by poetic tones. Beyond representation, the theatricality of the installation, Human use of human beings. An exercise in Lingua Generalissima (2014) by Romeo Castellucci and Societas, evokes the performative and collective dimension through the power of rituals. The grandeur of the scene is at the center of Sylvano Bussotti’s works, which theatrically opens up to the room of Guglielmo Castelli’s paintings, such as Compiuta Figura (2020) in which the artist overturns the canons of genre painting according to a subliminal, relational and modern dynamics.

In the main room, the design of the exhibition is made explicit. The work Stone Broken Circuit (2016-2020) by Micol Assaël, traces the map of a labyrinth on which to roll a couple of dices. It dialogues well with the pictorial abstract series Abecedarium 27-3-91 (1991) by Irma Blank, part of her Radical Writings series, in which the intense blue of her canvases evoke simultaneously a performative way of painting and a method of visual writing.

A reflection on the inheritance of abstract and conceptual art is at the core of the artists’ investigations in the final rooms, here declined through performative and gestural approaches. This is testified by works inspired by the Turandot, by Monica Bonvicini who, in Give Me the Pleasure (2019) reaffirms the feminine echo underlying the exhibition through writing and architectural interventions. It is flanked by the works of Lisetta Carmi, Isabella Costabile, and Bruna Esposito, and it culminates with the sculptural assemblage Trigger of the Space (1974) by Nanda Vigo, a complex of geometric and luminous modules in dialogue with the surrounding space and context.

The concluding section of the exhibition assumes suggestive and meditative tones. Accompanied by the site-specific works of Amedeo Polazzo and by the duo Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano, on the noble floor of the Palazzo, another brilliant dialogue between the abstract and the concrete is staged between the series of neon sculpturesTraslocando (Shy Led) (2019) by Davide Stucchi, and the rarefied atmospheres of Salvo‘s paintings, such as Rome (1999) futurist visions of modern cities and landscape. At the highest level of this journey, the film Zeus Machine. The Invincible (2019) by Zapruder Filmmakersgroup, puts in stage the exhibition machine, narrating myths and allegories through allusions and anachronisms.

Ultimately, the dialogue continues through the pulsating work Corpo di Fabbrica (2020) by Norma Jeane, an installation conceived for the arches of the Palace whereby the message of the exhibition projects outside, in dialogue with the city. As panorama of the contemporary state of art in Italy, FUORI. Quadriennale 2020 celebrates the greatness of Italian artists, masters in renovating artistic practices and languages between past, present and future narrations.

Info:

www.palazzoesposizioni.it/mostra/quadriennale-darte-2020-fuori