As part of the Galleria Aperta project, curated by Alessandro Sarteanesi and Marco Pierini, the city of Arezzo hosts the exhibition until 2 June Giovanni Frangi. The thousand lives of Showboat, edited by Giovanni Agosti. «Along the great rivers of the United States» writes Giovanni Agosti «in the second half of the nineteenth century and again in the first part of the following century, steamboats sailed on which variety shows were held: they were the showboat. The Showboat by Giovanni Frangi, a Milanese artist born in 1959, this time arrives in Arezzo, after having docked at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan in the spring of the previous year. And he reformulates and reshapes himself for the occasion: that’s why he is called The thousand lives of Showboat the constructed exhibition ad hoc for the spaces of the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Arezzo.
To better understand it in its hidden meanings it would be useful to equip oneself with the two volumesGone and the Return appeared in the series “Le lucciole” by the publisher Magonza (which also published Frangi The interview in 2021): a walk through the rooms might be enough to enjoy it. What are the attractions of this variety show, where new and old works are put together to the point of losing the sense of a linear chronology, despite the historical predilections of the curator, Giovanni Agosti, who is a teacher by profession?
A choice of large format engravings, spread over the course of twenty years, which give an account of Frangi’s predilection for experiments in the graphic field, mostly carried out with the aid of the Albicocco printing house in Udine (which, for the occasion, he made two carborundum engravings of the artist: Moira And Veronica, exhibited in the New Rooms); a landscape of television sets that between pallets and foam sculptures, veterans of the mythical Nobu at Elba of Villa Panza (2004), aspire to configure a scenography for a show, perhaps an operatic one: The Sarteanesi; the light from an old Super 8 projector hitting a sisal target; two emulsified canvases with Los Angeles seagulls in flight, which seem to mirror each other; a Muybridge-style exercise with five canvases showing a sequence of swans moving among the blue waters of a pre-Alpine lake, in Viverone; a panorama on tracing paper with the Casentino cliffs that surround the walls of a room, where owls and owls crouch: all taken by the enchanted Stigmata of Saint Francis by Bartolomeo della Gatta in the Pinacoteca of Castiglion Fiorentino, year 1486-1487, but look with an eye to Gilbert & George; four tables that pay a visit to the shadows of Joseph Beuys and the work carried out in almost fifty years of career by Frangi himself”.Giovanni Agosti.
Giovanni Frangi. The thousand lives of Showboat
13 April – 2 June 2024
edited by Giovanni Agosti
