The theme of nature, transversal to the history of art and rooted in the city of Bologna – where around Archangels in the heart of the 20th century the last naturalists had gathered – it brings together the research of ten artists from Bologna but not necessarily by birth, active since the 1950s and present at the CUBO exhibition at Porta Europa and Torre Unipol, entitled Eccentric Naturesedited by Pasquale Fameli in collaboration with Valentina Rossi.
The historically male dominance of artistic investigation into the natural data in the territory has prompted a line of research that intends to explore its phenomenology as it came to be codified in other freely divergent visions in the aftermath of the informal pictorial parenthesis. A contribution to a survey of the subsequent “other half of the avant-garde”, eccentric with respect to the neo-naturalist group that measured itself against the phenomenal face of reality, but also in relation to the feminist and eco-feminist perspectives of the 1970s – now revived – or to a categorically political discourse. The over 25 works, only partially recalled here, articulate an ecosystem of reverberations and differences.
From the outline of a radiant form engraved on the photograph of a solarized shrub vegetation, Sergia Aware brings out a cerulean iris that attracts the gaze “beyond the surface”, similar in this to the second proposed work, Sun’s Eyelasha sort of ceramic plaster viewer pointed at the panorama that extends as far as the eye can see beyond the windows of the Tower. Paper, sheet metal and rust construct the geometric abstraction of a Germination made by Pinuccia Bernardonia work from the 90s that echoes, for the essentially sculptural approach to the materials, in the anthropometric drawing of a leaf with continuous lines, an impression of the body through gesture. Myrtle Carroli there are two sharp syntheses of oaks, rivers and violets, enchanting and restless like childhood and its memories. The corten steel suggests the dichotomy between the idea and the material that gives it shape.
The out of focus to perceive more finely, trying to open the familiar and foreign soul irradiated by the sensitive all around, permeates the Abyss Of Valentina D’Accardiblow-up of one’s own home garden; the ceramic leaves scattered on the ground, stubbornly white, act as a counterpoint. Giulia Dall’Olio what have been called elsewhere “vegetable hierophanies” are present. The highlights of the fronds remain, obtained from charcoal with the eraser to remove them, the pictorial backgrounds are added to overlay them, recalling the ways of human intervention on the earth. Conceptual and decorative, Sabrina Mezzaqui sprinkles with small flowers, like red blood cells and capillaries, the white pages, somehow sisters, of an artist’s book and a screen. The voice of Sabrina Muziquoting ancient knowledge of mystics and female doctors, emerges together with the sounds of the elements from a sinuous alchemy of the paper that the soul of iron and painting have made sculptural.
From the forms of nature, trusted inspirers of Francesca Pasqualithe artist instead abstracts his own structures, textures, colours, electing organic and mineral matter as the master of artifice. Greta Schödl she extracts from vegetation the pigments for her unmistakable writing patterns where some rows of letters, isolated and filled with gold, seem to spread on the surfaces of pages and objects like electromagnetic radiation. Finally, the suture that Sissi performs between parallel natures – psychological, anatomical, botanical: the textile fibers worked like a nest around blind mirrors, one of which encapsulates a drawing of a curtain of brambles that appears at the height of the face like a self-portrait, extrovert the interior.
Pluralistically investigated and reimagined, nature as a phenomenal fact and concept understood beyond its physical manifestation is, in the final analysis, revealing an essentially human landscape. A cross-section of contemporary trends, dialectically suspended between instances of form and mental indices, but also the expression of a philosophy of the sensitive where the bond with nature also lives on in its distance from panic and ancestral conceptions, being assumed as a formative activity for thought.
The exhibition will be open to visitors in Bologna, at the two locations in Porta Europa and Torre Unipol of CUBO, the corporate museum of the Unipol Group, until 5 October 2024.
