Culture
Inside the big event EXTRALARGE of 10 May 2024 the Exhibition-Workshop by title“Form, Virtue”through which the artist Marco Popewho moved 14 years ago from Milan to Trapani, gives a poetic account of his vision of man and art, both through a series of works created in the early years of his work, and with those created instead for Trilogy on the Verge: Dancing, Fighting, Lovinga path that, starting from the collective phenomena ofshow business made up of rapid successes and equally rapid failures, it also reveals a strongly autobiographical, intimate and introspective character, however launching a warning to the complex world of art often spoiled by the very mechanisms of entertainment.
The project began more than 20 years ago due to the artist’s meeting with Gene Anthony Ray, i.eLeroy Johnsonthe dancer from the American series “Saranno Famous”(Dancing), who rose to the heights of global fame and then slowly collapsed into the abyss of solitude until his premature death. More recentlyTrilogy on the Verge saw Marco Papa’s fight with the boxer Mike Tyson(Fighting).
His conclusion is instead linked to the diva Brigitte Bardot (Loving). If this project reveals some of Marco Papa’s complex existential dynamics, the “Forma, Virtù” exhibition also offers the social aspect of his artistic vision, especially in recent years in Trapani. With his association “L’Uomo sulla Terra”, the artist has given life to objects of everyday life, such as seats and tables, understood as true works that aim to reconnect social life to art.
Some objects, however, more than others, have a symbolic value for Marco Papa that goes beyond their function, to the point of becoming a metaphysical meaning. One of these objects, in particular, is the re-proposal of Sicilian carriage which is located at the entrance to the Pepoli Museum. It is this baroque style object that suggested the project Meta Santa Physics Carriage.
In the artist’s vision (a 7 meter wide drawing) that carriage, understood as an instrument of the journeys of the past which, starting from Sicily, moved towards the rest of Europe, is reinterpreted as an object of the future, a traveling object, called to lead Humanity to a higher vision.
The project instead starts from the charm of the Venetian gondola Meta Gondola Physics Redeemer, which began with the creation of an incredible 10 meter long carbon fiber prototype, lowered into the waters of Venice for the 2017 Redentore festival and then, despite its size, brought first to Favignana and then, in 2018, to Pantelleria, where the meta-gondola sailed in the waters of Lake Specchio di Venere, with an effect of total alienation. The Gondola represents Venice, a city at the crossroads of civilizations and encounters between East and West.
Precisely in recent months and under the pressure of the international situation, the project has added the word Peace: Peace Gondola Physics Redeemer. And the journey of the Meta Gondola promises to be much longer and more complex, albeit with a very strong symbolic charge. The artist has in fact decided to push his Gondola of Peace on the Danube, the river whose banks have always represented the separation or meeting of different civilizations in European history. The project that sees the authoritative support of Bruno Corà will depart from Uhlm in Black Foresttouching 13 Nations and 23 Museums, to finally land on Black Sea.
At the exhibition event “Form, Virtue”the art historian and critic will also be presentRolando Bellini and the doctor Valeria LivigniPresident of the “Sebastiano Tusa” Foundation.
It will end with a performative act of Marco Pope, which announces the mission of its future foundation.
Seven adults: Liborio Palmeri, Bruno Corà, Rolando Bellini, Valeria Li Vigni, Daniela Toscano, Francesco Buranelli and the artist himself, will tell a little girl, Marta Mangiarotti, what their dream is to improve, through art, the condition of our society and will listen to the desire that is in the heart of the little girl so that all humanity can live a better future.
The next day, lOn May 11, 2024, attention shifts to Trapani, in the heart of the San Rocco Museum.
Here Marco Papa stages ahuge paper installation. Through a series of situations, the visitor is introduced, barefoot, into the dream, into the visions, into the artist’s soul: the sacred land of every human interiority, thearchetype of the Mother, but also of all the mothers who live in the hearts of their children. Kind and sweet mothers, aggressive and ferocious mothers. In Marco Papa’s path the path of awareness follows the path of non-knowledge, the light goes out to turn on the darkness which, eliminating the semblance of reality, allows us to reach the deepest layers of the heart, where the human spirit unites with the divine one. Therefore it isDIVINE DARKNESS the title that the artist wanted to give to his installation.
With this exhibition the San Rocco gives Marco Papa the right recognition for the generosity with which the artist enriched the various floors of the Museum with his presence, with the Dancing Crucifix in the oratory on the ground floor, with the large Golden Egg and his work “Breath of the Most Holy” on the first floor, with the Naked Christon the third floor, the same one that the city of Trapani saw lifted twenty meters high by a crane on Good Friday 2020, the year of the pandemic – explains the director of the Museum Don Liborio Palmeri – Just as San Rocco’s artistic and spiritual journey produces a mysterious catharsis, so does itthere is also the journey in the Divine Darkness of Marco Papa’s exhibition asks the visitor to leave for a moment the physical soil of the earth he walks on, to walk within himself, in his own heart, and find what he did not imagine”.
