Arezzo now hosts, as per the “new tradition”, art in places of history, in a basically explicit, sought-after and planned way. In the city’s Medici Fortress, within the “Estate in Fortezza 2024” event, the Guido d’Arezzo Foundation presents the exhibition Willow: lost in the yellow wind, contemporary art borrowed from the street. Just as in the sixteenth century that ashlar was supported by the project of famous Florentine architects, today it supports works of painting, sculpture, design and objects, the spirit of which is an already classic type of street art.
Willow’s painting in Arezzo, a sort of “metropolitan code revisited in a naturalistic sense”, edited by the Arezzo critic Fabio Improveti who, in the catalog published by Artein Editore explains its preambles and pertinences, establishes a sign gesture made autograph by the graffiti style Milanese, but which rhymes and echoes punctuating the string course, soffits, flares, corridors of the internal walls of the walkways of the Medici Fortress of Arezzo.
Lending itself to confirm but also to correct and defeat the iconographic spectrum of the cliché, renewed by contamination, Willow – in Arezzo from 29 June to 23 August 2024 – makes a work that seems like a younger language than what it actually is, through a delicacy driven towards elegance and through a rhythm of color to be savored, without immediately trying to make it your own.
On the proposal of ForKunst, with the patronage of the Municipality of Arezzo and that of the Guido d’Arezzo Foundation, with the contribution of technical entities such as Cosmosservizi, the exhibition Willow – lost in the yellow wind is documented by a catalog with the introduction of the Mayor of Arezzo and the texts of the Curator.
Since the School of Comics, in 2000, the author has collaborated with production companies around the world, always halfway between illustration and design. In this sense, Willow’s expressive path becomes both stylistic and pragmatic; he follows codes and dictates of postmodern taste, but he soon becomes an advocate of a freer guide to contemporary historical events, one made up of interpersonal, transversal, extratextual contaminations. Its creative matrix becomes almost more listening, setting, than reading, sociocultural imposition: painting as a social trace in the iconography of comics, but, more and better, in the broad sense of the text, of summarizing without doing so, in a narrative dimension of codes liquid and symbolic at the same time, in short edifying, almost ennobling a certain “Arts and Crafts” memory of the most current transduction.
This is how the promotional facades of well-known brands live and make themselves known, which, thanks to Willow, are now not only lent to art, but can interact with the dignity of time that makes history, through the boss, the slit, the walkway, the powder magazine of the Medici Fortress of Arezzo. As part of the “Estate in Fortezza 2024” exhibition, Willow’s contemporary art colors the ancient air of Arezzo which, from Friday 28 June at 5.30 pm, becomes even more ritualistic for the Vasari celebrations.
Guido d’Arezzo Foundation press office
Chiarello Clean & Partners
