Tuesday, July 17, 2018 the Pole Museum of Basilicata has organized a day dedicated to contemporary art and languages, during which the first part of the cultural planning of the summer 2018 will be presented to the community.
At 5.00 pm it will be shown to the public during a press conference, which will be attended by the director of the Polo Marta Ragozzino and the director of Matera – Basilicata 2019 Paolo Verri, the project Ten photographers for ten museums, realized thanks to the Plan of contemporary art of MiBACT. The two exhibitions of Francesco Radino will be presented at Palazzo Lanfranchi and Mario Cresci at the Ridola Matera Museum, which will be inaugurated together with all the other Thursday 19 at 19.00, in the “less one”, around 2019.
The highlight of the day will be at 7.00 pm when the exhibition The Angel of the History of the Roman artist Andrea Fogli will be inaugurated in the Church of the Carmine, which is inspired by the thought of Walter Benjamin, contained in the IX thesis of philosophy of history and inspired by a painting by Paul Klee, an artist also loved by Fogli.
For the Church of Carmine, Fogli has specially designed an installation that recreates in a special way the cycle of the 59 terracotta heads, exhibited for the first time in Rome on April 25, 2016 in the Museum of Via Ostiense in Porta San Paolo, symbolic place of Resistance to nazi-fascism. Together with the terracotta heads, of very strong emotional impact, the artist exhibited in the church now open to contemporary art, 9 drawings of the cycle of 59 faces made of graphite powder in 2017, never until now exposed, and a small book with fragments of diary that like a “rosary of the faces” will propose to the visitor further food for thought.
“It is – explains the artist – of a work born of the need to put man at the center, the human condition in its reality through a process of empathy and empathy that can oppose the distance and indifference that distinguish more and more only contemporary art, but western societies and our daily behavior “.
The cycle of the 59 heads in terracotta, placed all on one big table in front of the altar, in the church wrapped in the semi-darkness, presents itself with force and clarity before our eyes as the emblem of all those human beings who have been persecuted for racial or political reasons, or simply forgotten because of our indifference “under the carpet of history and progress: from Auschwitz to Lampedusa, from South America to Africa and the Middle East“. The intent of Fogli is to “draw from oblivion what history deletes, persecutes and humiliates, giving a face to those to whom it has been subtracted, sometimes in a more subtle way than the primitive rite of decapitation, that between the another does not cease to be perpetrated ยป.
Complete the path, through which the artist tries to “awaken in the visitor empathy and identification“, a polyptych composed of 9 faces drawn with the graphite powder placed as an altarpiece in a side chapel, and a small book, placed as a “missal” on a church bench, in which the artist questions one by one the 59 faces of “these unknown and nameless beings rushed into my studio, in a synchronic act, or pact, of mutual help “and to whom he asks a question that accompanies us from the beginning of time:” Who are you? Who I am? Who we are?”
Thanks to an installation that mimics dialogue with the elements and spaces of the church, as well as for the use of the number 59 that echoes the grains of the marian Rosary, the exhibition is also a stimulating dialogue between art and religion, free from confessional and orthodox schemes, and therefore able to speak to each of us.
The exhibition is inaugurated simultaneously with the publication of a book, Diary of dust and clay, published by Quodlibet and introduced by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in which the artist has collected the 59 terracotta heads with the written passages of the diary ” on the sidelines “to each sculpture, and some of the 59 drawings in graphite powder accompanied by fragments written from 1980 to today in which he noted his thoughts on the face, the image, the dust and the evanescence.
The exhibition will remain set up until October 20, 2018, with the opening hours of the Museum
[every day, including holidays, 9.00 – 20.00. Wednesday 11.00 – 20.00].
Free entry.
Matera, 13 July 2019