The wall – Darkness, on the edge of vision

An original exhibition format, conceived by director Sergio Risaliti, which proposes the synthesis and visual processing typical of the infographic and offers the viewer a figurative scheme, rich in information and interconnected suggestions, graphically developed along the wall. The first exhibition, curated by Marco Bazzini, former director of the Pecci Museum in Prato, with the collaboration of Isia Firenze, is entitled “Darkness – On the edge of vision” and investigates the theme of darkness not as an absence, but rather as a line common to tell the history of art from a new point of view, to understand how artists have used or experienced or depicted the darkness starting from their contemporaries to go back through the centuries.

The Wall organizes, in an easily understandable graphic model, information, concepts and data on the works collected by the curator in order to suggest to the visitor new stimuli and new traces of reading.

Defining darkness is difficult. Is it a character, a dimension, a metaphor? A condition or rather an environment? Darkness is, however it declines, something certainly ambivalent. It introduces itself and retracts at the same time. There is no darkness without light, darkness without clarity. Precisely because it is unattainable in its entirety, in this exhibition darkness has been sought in works of art. A visual journey through the history of art that highlights how darkness in its constant presence – it is too often believed that art is the only light – changes according to culture and time.

If the most recent artists invite us to stay in the dark, other protagonists of the twentieth century refer to the dark as a material for pictorial expression or for introspective investigation. A journey of over 60 works which, proceeding in reverse, leads to the representation of nocturnes, a pictorial genre whose first episode is located in Florence in the Baroncelli Chapel of Santa Croce with the Announcement to the Shepherds by Taddeo Gaddi.