Duel – Francesca Banchelli. The silent dogs go away

Where and when

From

11July 2020

12October 2020

Museo Novecento

Ground Floor

“The moment we live in is a reservoir of new horizons and rediscoveries both for individuals and for society. It is dizzying but also fascinating to live and witness how change can come all of a sudden, a slide that takes you from one floor to another”.

-Francesca Banchelli

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

9:00 pm

Thursday

Francesca Banchelli (Montevarchi, Arezzo 1981) is the protagonist of the eighth appointment of the Duel project, the title of which refers to a dialectical duel between contemporary artists and the museum’s artistic heritage.
The silent dogs go away is the Tuscan artist’s first solo show in an Italian museum. The exhibition itinerary was born and developed around the dialogue with the work Apocalypse, painted by Scipione (Gino Bonichi) in 1930 and selected by Banchelli several months ago, before the world was overwhelmed by the pandemic.

Seen in hindsight, his choice may sound almost like a prophecy, an omen or a lucky intuition. In reality, it is more likely the ability of some artists to perceive the world and current events, to position themselves in them, at the right point and at the right time. Francesca Banchelli has a very precise idea of the function of art and artistic practice, which perhaps brings her closer to her predecessor Scipio. She is convinced of the need for the work as an epiphany and gnoseological event that is essential to the evolution of the human species. There are also linguistic elements that link Banchelli’s path to Scipione, and by extension to that artistic climate, to that stylistic temperature; a certain way of understanding figurative language as a means of landing on reality through the dreamlike, surreal experience of the imagination and dreams.

Like many other artists of her generation, Francesca Banchelli works with different materials and techniques, from performative actions, between dance and theater, to video, drawing, painting, sculpture and sound. In this sense, all the works on display return the versatility of his activity and are linked to a project that the artist has been carrying out for several years around the theme of the fugitive.

Fugitives are solitary figures or small communities who set out and meet, physically or ideally, to reformulate a new beginning, starting from something that has been interrupted or has been destroyed.

Subjects of a human experience of the world and of history that seem suspended between the shipwreck and the landing, in a time in which to create community, to create a nucleus, made up of shared desires and expectations, seems to be the beginning of a neo-revolution. -humanities that will eventually involve everyone. Apocalypse and the epic of the Fugitives speak to each other in the sign of epochal change and a time to come after the experience of the crisis and the desert.