“Taking stock of contemporary Italian art” is a recurring phrase when it comes to great collectives and above all of this, the Rome quadrennance. Starting in 1931, she came to eighteenth reply.
Designed by Luca Beatrice, president of the Quadriennale Foundation, missed in January of this year, this edition brings the title of “Fantastic” and maintains the curatorial team desired by the late Turin critical: Luca Massimo Barbero, Francesco Bonami, Emanuela Mazzonis of Pralateria, Francesco Stocchi, Alessandra Troncone. The artists who will have to represent “the state of the art of Italian art” are 54, a group whose composition has been revealed a few days ago. A few data: 16 are under 35, 45 are at the first participation in the four -year, the works will be 187.
What are those choices is not yet known, because the exhibition will open in October (open until January 2026), but the artists are known and we know what to expect. And the point is that the point is not there. I mean: there is no trend, a general line. Italian art, and above all that chosen here, made by mid-care or emerging artists, goes like that of the whole world, that is, in the most disparate directions. At most, the curators (chosen by Beatrice with a view to transversality) adopted a common thread: Emanuela Mazzonis of Pralateria, for example, brought only photography, although declined in part in traditional images (the anatomical details of Eleonora Agostini) and partly in work on the borders of post-photography or even further, as for Jacopo Benassi (photos worked, Overlapping, trapped by belts) and Irene Fenara (unreliable, disturbing images from surveillance cameras).
Francesco Stocchi, on the other hand, chose a selection of heterogeneous artists: from the paintings with large minimal and superflat pop forms by Adelaide Cioni, to the cold metal installations of Micol Assël, passing through Martino Gamper, designer of internal objects curiously between Depero and Spalletti, and for the shady and mysterious paintings signed by Pietro Roccasalva. Luca Massimo Barbero frames a frequent feature of contemporary art, that is, talking about himself, and does it by selecting a couple of young rising stars such as Roberto De Pinto and Emilio Gola (who depict himself and his generation), but curiously choosing also abstractionism with parallel traces of Paolo Bini and the swirling blocked visions of Matteo Fato. Alessandra Troncone, in continuity with the widespread work of study Visit conducted for the four-year in recent years, has chosen very emergent artists, linked by the guiding thread of the body, but who adopt the most varied expressive means: performative installations with Antonio della Guardia, gigantic post-human polymeric monstries with agnes questionmark, beautiful twilight canvases imbued with disturbing eroticism with Iva. Lulashi. Francesco Bonami, the most rock star of everyone, I left him last, because he made the most surprising choices. But on the contrary.
The artists he has selected simply make painting and also rather combed: Jem Perucchini, Shafei Xia, Chiara Enzo, Cecilia De Nisco, Lupo Borgonovo are all artists that I like very much. And Bonami knows that they are considered a “collector with a traditional taste”.
