For those who have studied classic manuals on the history of modern art, the entry Felice Carena is equivalent to a symbolic image: Still life with shells. And, in truth, still life was one of the strong points of the Turin painter who in the 1920s navigated among the currents that rejected academicism to try to Italianize the aesthetics of the European avant-garde. But still life was not his only frontier as it had been for Giorgio Morandi and this is demonstrated by an interesting anthology just inaugurated at the Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza Scala, which instead illustrates in an almost unprecedented way the many faces of one of the protagonists of that Italian modernism that is still not adequately valorised. A gift to fans of the twentieth century, therefore, that of Gallerie d’Italia and its president emeritus Giovanni Bazoli who is also president of the Cini Foundation from which a nucleus of 33 works of the over one hundred on display in Piazza Scala comes. The exhibition examines the long journey undertaken by the artist through his Roman, Florentine and Venetian experiences, which gradually brought him into contact with the exponents of various currents, in particular the so-called Roman Secessionism which was so opposed to the return to order as for Futurism, and which brought together artists from different backgrounds, even very distant ones, such as Gino Rossi, Felice Casorati, Armando Spadini, Plinio Nomellini, Lorenzo Viani, Laurenzio Laurenzi, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Felice Carena, Giuseppe Carosi and the Cremonese painter Emilio Rizzi. These artists, as happened in the 1930s with the exponents of Corrente, proved to be as sensitive as sponges to the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, such as Symbolism, German Expressionism, the Fauvists and the Vienna Secession of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka . The preamble is necessary to understand the eclecticism of a painter like Carena whose painting, in fact, as the Milanese exhibition well expresses, ranged throughout his life from symbolist subjects to expressionist styles, from metaphysical landscapes to the magical realism of masterpieces such as Summer of 1933. Here is the greatness, but perhaps also the limit, of a twentieth-century artist with an identity that is difficult to recognise, beyond his undisputed pictorial quality. Helping us reevaluate it is the curatorship of four critics: Luca Massimo Barbero, Virginia Baradel, Luigi Cavallo and above all Elena Pontiggia, the greatest Italian expert of that period. It is Pontiggia herself who underlines the importance of returning to Modernism an author who is still today placed within the confines of nineteenth-century realism. Pontiggia underlines “two factors contributed to her failure to recognize her: the artist’s erroneous identification with the fascist regime, and his spirituality, little understood in the century of the eclipse of the sacred”. In any case, it is right to enjoy this unexpected spectacle of painting with works coming not only from the Cini Foundation, but also from numerous private collections: from the abstract and volumetric compositions of the 1920s, such as The Apostles and La Pergola to the sacred paintings of the Italian post-war period. The curators have divided the exhibition into six sections, each dedicated to a specific period of the artist’s life, «trying to restore the common denominator of all Carena’s works, that is, the search for an internal light in objects. A light that does not caress bodies, but emanates from them, becoming form itself.”
In the opinion of the writer, the real gem is represented by the nucleus of inks on paper with a mythological theme from the Cini collection, an explosion of expressive freedom that seems to fully represent the creative personality of this great Italian.
