Bright colours, simplified shapes, references to television or advertising images. But also documents from an era characterized by protest and a soundtrack that accompanies the visual experience. For the first time, there Pop art Italian comes to the exhibition together with culture Beat and its expressions from the North to the South of the Peninsula. This is what the Palladian Basilica offers Of Vicenza.
The Pop Beat exhibition in Vicenza according to the curator
Second Roberto Floreani – painter and curator of the exhibition Pop/Beat underway in Vicenza – the term “Neo-Futurism” would be more suitable to identify Italian Pop Art: a definition that “would certainly have had a reason to exist, emancipating us first of all, even semantically, from American Pop Art and secondly hoarding the declarations on the futurist origin of their research of a good part of the artists present in this project”he writes in the catalog essay.
Set aside complaints on definitions, exposure for the first time combines visual art, which we will continue to call “Pop”, to the musical and literary testimonies of the Italian Beat season, with an insight into the activity of Nat Scammacca’s Sicilian Antigroup, now almost forgotten.
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The artists of Italian Pop Art in the exhibition at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza
In the large hall of the Palladian Basilica they are present thirty-five of the major protagonists whostarting from the very early sixties, they went through the great economic boom and they went up to 1979. A date which, for the curator, marks the “end of the dream” and the beginning of the Years of Lead. From Valerio Adami and Franco Angeli,until Cesare Tacchi and Emilio Tadinithe exhibition lists almost a hundred significant works, some of which are very well-known – just think of the Futurism revisited by Mario Schifano – and others less accessible to the general public, coming from private collections.
Particular attention is given to large-format pictorial works, which are flanked by numerous sculptures and installations. They can be observed on the walls Mental self-washinglarge canvas by Valerio Adami from 1964, or the famous silhouettes of Charles de Gaulle he was born in Typical Krushov gesture painted by Sergio Lombardo between 1961 and 1963.
The story therefore starts from the precursors, such as Enrico Baj and Mimmo Rotella, and then brings together the results of the Piazza del Popolo school and of independent artists who have made the figure and the link with mass society the foundations of their poetics, even in cases where their adherence to Pop art was not exclusive.
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The Italian Beat in the exhibition at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza
The common feeling of those years, according to Floreani, cannot ignore a focus on Beat, starting with the music that is played on loop in the exhibition spaces. To represent the movement in its Italian declination, rare original documents from Gianni Milanmentor of an entire generation, and the publications of the Sicilian Antigroup led by the charismatic figure of Nat Scammacca, who was in clear opposition to the Gruppo ’63 and its links with the great publishers of Northern Italy.
In summary, the exhibition seems to want to mark the distance between Italian authors and those from overseas, at the same time offering a nostalgic vision of a golden age that generations who did not live through it rarely regret.
Marta Santacatterina
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