Luca Vitone. D’après (De Pisis – Paolini)

Exhibition Hours

Three artists, three generations compared in a game of joints and references made up of iconographic coincidences, conceptual strategies and artistic and literary passions: Filippo de Pisis, Giulio Paolini and Luca Vitone meet at the Museo Novecento in a dialogue with three voices, at the interior of an exhibition project starting from March 18 and until September 7, 2022. The new season of exhibitions proposes a surprising and completely original exhibition project, which allows to deepen the knowledge of three apparently very different artists, re-reading their production starting from a new perspective. Three solo exhibitions, separate but interconnected, which give life to a game of mirrors and thematic comparisons.

In the watercolor Stanze (Studio Giulio Paolini, Turin), exhibited in the first room, the artist stages the rooms of Paolini’s atelier starting with the recovery of the dust accumulated in them, which is here transformed into a pictorial non-pigment. “The dust speaks of a cosmogony that refers to the universe and the absolute. The dust with its presence fills the void that surrounds us. A watercolor of dust tells of this emptiness and speaks of the world. Dust is present in the metaphysical space of Giorgio de Chirico who was looking for painters who painted the void, but the void does not exist, to paraphrase John Cage, and the void, that is the world, is Giulio Paolini who with his representations of space defines the places of thought ”, declares Luca Vitone.

The next room is then shaped by Il Gladiolo Fulminato (Homage to Filippo de Pisis), an olfactory sculpture created in collaboration with Maria Candida Gentile inspired by the painting of the same name by de Pisis, deliberately not included in the rooms dedicated to it. The canvas by the Ferrara master, painted in 1930, represents the magical moment in the life of a flower vase and its gladiolus. A magic that lasts a glance, that of the artist who was able to grasp the unpredictability of the moment of a gust of wind that shook the flowers. That absence of materiality is present in the sculpture that looks at the painting and tells it with the smell of flowers as they unfold. A fragrant sculpture capable of capturing the material of the picture with its invisibility to transmit an olfactory memory.

The ‘dematerialization’ that distinguishes these works is combined with the very fundamental presence of the artist’s words, which accompany the visitor on an aesthetic journey and conceptual and sensorial exploration at the same time.

Luca Vitone

(Genoa, 1964) studied at the DAMS in Bologna and in the 1990s he moved to Milan and then moved to Berlin in 2010. Since the 1980s his research has focused on the idea of ​​place understood as a social space, with which individuals and communities relate, leaving a trace of one’s passage. Author of a research with a conceptual imprint, he usually resorts to different media and materials (from food to music, from essences to dust and cartography). His works tell the story of the places and communities that live and cross them, giving life to a subjective mapping that is recomposed into completely personal geographies. Witness of his own time, with his works he narrates significant events, intertwining the individual memory with the collective one. Similar reflections lead him to often investigate the political and social implications that characterize our era, paying particular attention to the dynamics and symbols of ‘power’.
His works have been exhibited in public and private spaces in Italy and abroad including: Openspace, Milan; Academy of France; Villa Medici, Rome; OK-Centrum, Linz; PS1, New York; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, Prato; PAC, Milan; Casino Luxemburg, Luxembourg; Lenbachaus Kunstbau, Munich; National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; MAMCO, Geneva; 2nd Biennial of Valencia; 50th Venice Biennale; ARC Musée d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Villa Arson, Nice; GNAM, Rome; MART, Rovereto; 8th Sharjah Biennial; GAMeC, Bergamo; 13th International Sculpture Biennial of Carrara; Museion in Bolzano, Nomas Foundation in Rome, Riso Museum, Palermo; 4th Biennial of Tirana; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; MMOMA, Moscow; CAPC, Bordeaux; Brodbeck Foundation, Catania; 1st Biennial of Montevideo; 55th Venice Biennale; BOZAR, Brussels; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Triennale of Milan; Zimei Foundation, Montesilvano; Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow; MACRO, Rome; CSAC, Parma; Weserburg Museum, Bremen; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Villa Adriana, Tivoli.

He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including recently the Italian Council (2018) promoted by MiBACT and the tender for the realization of the Il Parco del Polcevera project (2019) for the victims of the collapse of the Morandi bridge.