From June 29 to September 10, 2024, the artist Diego Esposito returns to Teramo, his hometown, with a widespread exhibition involving 5 symbolic places of the city, entitled “5X ILLVMINATES LVCEM”, curated by Marco Meneguzzo and Aldo Iori. The inauguration is scheduled for Saturday June 29that 6:00 pm, will take place at L’ARCA (Laboratory for Contemporary Arts) in Largo San Matteo.
The LVX ILLVMINAT LVCEM exhibition project, organized by the Rotary Club Teramo Est in collaboration with Galleria Allegra Ravizza of Lugano, takes its name from the title of a ceramic sculpture conceived by the artist for the Cathedral of Teramo and involves the placement of works, both historical and of new site-specific creation, plus a permanent work.
I am five city locations involved for their spiritual, social and cultural significance: THE ARK (Laboratory for Contemporary Arts), the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assuntathe Civic Art Gallerythe Regional library ‘Melchiorre Delfico’ and the park of the Villa Comunale where the permanent work will be placed.
After almost fifty years of residences in the cities of Milan and Venice, long stays for study and exhibition activities all over the world, Diego Esposito consolidates the strong bond with the city of Teramo on the relationship between work and place. In the past, Esposito had exhibited in Teramo in personal exhibitions (the last in 2003) and collective exhibitions (Exempla 2 in 2002). The spatial question has always been present in the artist’s work since the installations conceived for the University of Teramo starting in 1991 with O-blu and Cascata in 1996; later, between 2000 and 2001, with Naos (formerly in the Gardens of the Villa Comunale and now in the Faculty of Law); the last one, in 2014, for the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Law with Suono del Tempo Color Scales in the modern university campus of Coste Sant’Agostino.
Places and works
The ARCA (Laboratory for Contemporary Arts)
Pictorial works
For the exhibition space in Largo San Martino in the center of Teramo, the artist has planned a particular installation consisting of a corpus of ten large and medium-sized works in relation to each other. Historic works, some of which have never been seen before in Italy, will be placed alongside new ones created specifically for the exhibition.
Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Piazza Duomo
LVX ILLVMINAT LVCEM, 2023-24, gold majolica, 35x38x5 cm
In a chapel of the Cathedral, the work LVX ILLVMINAT LVCEM, created at the Ceramiche Biagioli La Mastro Giorgio of Gubbio (Pg), will be placed on a linen cloth. The ceramic takes up the dimensions of a stone present on the facade of the Cathedral of Teramo and the Roman epigraphic writing is placed on a gold background, a tribute to the golden luminosity of the large polyptych by the Venetian Jacobello del Fiore from 1439. The Renaissance work connects the Teramo culture to the city of Venice, where Diego Esposito lived for many years and whose brightness and position between East and West were a constant reference for his work.
Regional Library ‘Melchiorre Delfico’, Via Delfico 16
Paper works
Paper works will be placed in the eight display cases located in the internal cloister of the eighteenth-century Palazzo Delfico. In particular, these are unique works that include travel notebooks and notebooks of notes and watercolors made for specific occasions or readings of poetic or philosophical texts. Some of these works will be donated to the Library. Two watercolor works (Drawing cosmogonies, 2024) will be placed on the wall adjacent to the monumental stairs.… read the rest of the article»
Civic Art Gallery, Viale Giovanni Bovio, 1
Art is always contemporary / Traces in Teramo, 2024, mosaic, 40X80 cm
The work is inspired by the recent discovery of a Roman-era building in Via Sant’Antonio in which there are various floors made of stone mosaic textures. One of them in particular interests Diego Esposito for its strong and unusual geometric abstraction which recalls the subsequent experiences of the neoplasticist movement of the early twentieth century, dear to him. A replica of a fragment of the floor mosaic will be remade with similar, colored tiles and compared with a similar mosaic created by the artist with similar, white tiles; placed side by side in a room of the Civic Art Gallery to mark the contemporaneity of experiences distant in time.
Finally in July in Park of the Villa Comunale of Teramoa new large permanent sculptural work, Mappa celeste, will be placed there, designed and created specifically for this purpose: his work Naos was already placed in the park on the occasion of the Exempia 2 exhibition in 2002 and has now been relocated to the University of Studies where, in the modern university campus of Coste Sant’Angelo at the Faculty of Law, other permanent works and the large decoration of the Aula Magna from 2016 can be visited.
After the inauguration the catalog of the Diego Esposito exhibition. LVX ILLVMINAT LVCEM (Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo MI) edited by Marco Meneguzzo, art critic and teacher at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, and by Aldo Iori, art critic and teacher at the University of the Studies of Perugia; the bilingual it/en volume will contain the institutional texts, the critical texts of the curators, the illustrations of the works on display and of other historical works by the artist, the apparatus with the technical data sheets of the works, a critical anthology and a bio-bibliography by the artist (graphic project: Ybrand, Pescara).
Guided tours of the various city sites are planned.
Diego Esposito (Teramo, 1940) lives and works between Milan, Venice and Teramo. Former teacher of painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, he resided in the United States from 1968 to 1972 where he exhibited his first solo exhibition at the Art Alliance in Philadelphia in 1969. Since 1972 he has been in Milan and his works show a marked interest in colour, invested with symbolic and alchemical values. In 1973 he participated in “Italy Two. Art around ’70” curated by Alberto Boatto and Filiberto Menna in Philadelphia. In 1974 he was present with two solo exhibitions at the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan and at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa. In 1975 he exhibited at the Toselli Gallery in Milan and at the Banco-Massimo Minini in Brescia and in 1977 at the Paola Betti Gallery in Milan. Mediterranean culture and travels to Greece and Turkey also inspire the works of the 1980s in which the cadmium yellow artificial light source is present. We remember the solo exhibitions at the Castello Estense in Mesola in 1991, at the Mudima Foundation in Milan in 1993, at Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia curated by Bruno Corà in 1998. In 2000 he was invited to exhibit at the University Art Gallery UCSD in San Diego (USA) and in 2001 he presented his work at the Ludwigsburg Kunstverein in Ludwigsburg (Germany) and created a permanent work for the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Center in Prato. In 2003 he inaugurated an anthology at the Pinacoteca Civica and at the Villeroy e Boch in Teramo and participated in the “Haifa Second International Installation Triennale” in Haifa (Israel). In 2004 he was invited as artist-in-residence in Kanazawa (Japan) by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and Kanazawa Art University, where he created the permanent sculpture Celato / Svelato. The following year he was invited by the Ihn Gallery in Seoul (South Korea) for a solo exhibition. In 2006 he participated in the exhibition “Italian sculpture of the 20th century” at the A. Pomodoro Foundation in Milan and in the “XII International Sculpture Biennial” in Carrara, in 2008 in the exhibition “Constants of the classic in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries” at the Puglisi Cosentino Foundation in Catania presented an important series of watercolors in a solo exhibition at the Giacomo Guidi Gallery in Rome in 2009. In 2001 the “Latitude/Longitude” project began, which involves the permanent placement of works in contemporary art museums on different continents. Currently nine have been created: at the ‘Luigi Pecci’ Center for Contemporary Art in Prato (2001), in the Oriental Land Park in Shanghai in China (2007), in the park of the Caraffa Museum in Córdoba in Argentina (2010), in the Centro Cultural Ccori Wasi of Lima in Peru (2011), at the Muryokoin Temple, Koyasan in Japan (2015), at the University of Marseille in France (2015), in the garden of the Cini Foundation on the Island of San Giorgio in Venice (2016), at the University of Teramo (2017) at the Zuratkul National Park, Satka in the Russian Urals (2018). In 2014 he created a vast mural decoration in the rector’s hall of the University of Teramo. In 2018 he placed a series of permanent works in the “Contemporary Sculptures Garden” of the University of Teramo – Campus Aurelio Saliceti. In 2024 he inaugurated his personal exhibition “Il Luogo Invisibile” curated by Marco Meneguzzo in the Galleria Allegra Ravizza of Villa Ca’Amata in Castelfranco Veneto.
Sponsorship: Municipality of Teramo, Province of Teramo, University of Teramo, BIM Teramo.
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