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Modern Times: Online exhibition curated by Flavio Favelli, contemporary artist that with his artworks combine conceptual and pop art,

16 July 2025

Modern Times: Online exhibition curated by Flavio Favelli, contemporary artist that with his artworks combine conceptual and pop art

Current exhibition
  • The figure of the artist implies a distance from many things.
    From reality, understood as current events and societal issues; from the world of work, seen as a place of defined roles responding to the needs of the country and the market; and from power, understood as the realm of institutions and politics.
    And this is not because these areas are uninteresting, but because art does not deal - and should not deal -  with things that are too real.
    Its nature is distance from truth, a kind of parallel track to the mundane affairs of humanity.
    We want it to remain representation.
  • As a conscious artist, committed to not being committed, I have chosen eight paintings from the 1950s to the 1980s. Artworks I would like to have in my home — and this method, pleasure, seems to me the most serious one for an artist. I would dare say that art is a matter of taste, and taste has to do with form, often neglected by the purist-conceptualist bloc. I simply find that these works contain correspondences, visual meanings that draw my attention.
     
    Romiti and Perilli surprise with their disorienting arrangements, with overturned planes that force an attempt at understanding that slips away.
    And it is precisely this escape that we like, this feeling of disorientation.
    Perhaps Romiti is trying to compose some flowers—a bud seems to emerge from the strict and lost compartments of the psyche.
    Perhaps Perilli is seeking banners, libation cups, over which a yellow sun descends.
     
    Afro, in Green Composition, leads us down a barely marked path.
    Even if they look like smudges and streaks on a dirty wall or grimy scribbles, they tell us they belong to us.
    A gray mark at the bottom resembles the lines of a palm; there is something primitive and archaic tugging at our sleeve. A bit more sophisticated—meaning less natural—is Mario Schifano’s work, which we believe depicts sea waves, or so it seems.

    Anonymous, timeless, black swells.
     
    Sooner or later, we all stop to look at the sea—a kind of obligatory pleasure we believe can soothe us.
    After all, the continuous blue and black waves are the last mysteries we have left, and this piece of dark sea perhaps signals the beginning of some abyss.
    • Abstract painting
      Achille Perilli, Omaggio a Nerone, 1966
    • An oil paint and mixed media abstract composition in green, white, and black. Artwork details: Artist: Afro Basaldella. Artwork title: Composizione verde. Artwork year: 1963. Artwork medium: Oil and mixed media. Artwork dimensions: 48 x 63 cm.
      Afro Basaldella, Composizione verde, 1963
  • Mattia Moreni’s Cartello per la Pensione Ristorante Casadei disorients us. It seems like a kind of erasure, or a joke. Or a moment of confusion, of suspension from earthly duties—as if to make a sign.

    Can art be useful? To make a restaurant sign?

    I don’t particularly love Carlo Levi, but Giardini ad Alassio presents itself as a tangle of uncertainties, with shrubs, flowers, and trees almost evaporated in favor of a free composition without many footholds.
    One gets lost in a domestic jungle, more than a garden.

    More real is Fausto Pirandello’s Natura morta, which freezes a modern gaze. These are masculine subjects—things of men, of bars, coffee, spirits, cities, and commerce; things in motion that stop to become more authoritative. Windows into eternal places of modernity and contemporaneity, images of seduction.

  • And one cannot help but be seduced by Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair, perhaps one of the most devastating images in human history.
    Warhol is the supreme priest of modernity, capable of declaring both its beginning and its end.
    The electric chair of a society that often touches delirium is elevated to a light, almost playful image—here in mimosa yellow against a baby blue sky.

    • An oil on canvas abstract grey painting with white and black highlights.
      Mattia Moreni, Cartello per la Pensione Ristorante Casadei, 1962
    • A silkscreen print of an electric chair in yellow and blue.
      Andy Warhol, Electric chair, 1971
  • The time span of these works - about thirty years - is a long, dense, and crucial moment of our era.
    These compositions, by both well-known and lesser-known artists, appear as voices oscillating between the inside and outside of this period - a kind of mythical, original time of our society, to which we turn with great respect and passion.


    They are the core of the Modern Times that will never leave us.

  • Flavio Favelli

    Favelli's portrait

    Flavio Favelli is a contemporary artist. 

    His production is highly influenced by the advertising images of the 1980s, which are repeated in an almost obsessive and manic manner in many of his artworks. In his collages, sculptures and installations he mostly uses objects of furniture and common use, chandeliers, tables, trays, cans of soft drinks, which bring the mante back to the family and social culture of his years. His exprsession is a combination of conceptual art and pop art. This hybrid soul makes him an artist with a strongly distinctive and identifiable style.

  • Related artists

    • Detail of a tapestry made in eight-colour wool depicting the Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists), in the Dorsoduro district of Venice. It takes its name from an ancient custom of fist fights that took place on many of the bridges. Beneath the bridge, we see

      Afro Basaldella

      Read more
    • A detail of an oil on canvas abstract grey painting with white and black highlights.

      Mattia Moreni

      Read more
    • Achille Perilli

      Achille Perilli

      Read more
    • Detail of an abstract oil painting that uses fast-paced paint application to capture movement and reverberating fruit clusters in orange and red against a dark blue and green background.

      Mario Schifano

      Read more
    • Detail of a silkscreen print of an electric chair in yellow and blue.

      Andy Warhol

      Read more
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