< Meta-Links >: Online Exhibition curated by Luca Pozzi, Artist and Cross-Disciplinary Mediator, Winner of the VDA Award (Var Digital Art 2023).

< What links a space probe to an 18th-century church? A knight to his castle? Rotten watermelons to rusty armour? Pointed sticks held together by strips of padded fabric to fragile scaffolding suspended by thin steel cables? >

Several premises underlie Giorgio de Chirico’s and his brother Alberto Savinio’s Metaphysics. They were known as the Greek Dioscuri of the 20th century and believed what is underlined in Savinio’s words: "The more intelligent the artist, the more he uses indirect means". The <Ritorno al Castello Avito> and <Cocomeri e Corazze> are explicit proof of this. In these artworks, as well as in their metaphysical painting, art is considered an exploratory mission, an attempt to go beyond one's physical and cognitive limits. In addition, language is intended as "Argo" or the great Argonaut's navigation vehicle – capable of jumping between dimensions, reality and fiction, life and legend – looking for the Golden Fleece of Chrysomallo that defeats all illnesses and grants eternal life. These are the premises that underlie their works of art. </Ritorno al Castello Avito> </Cocomeri e Corazze>

The same metaphysics is echoed in the <Senza Titolo> work by Pierpaolo Campanini (Ferrara, 1964). His own words even confirm it: “Painting is just a desire for me. It is not the first thing I did...It took time, it brought a certain chaos to my organised thoughts. Through disorder, details that were buried in memory slowly emerged, along with topics left out in forgotten conversations, things seen from the corner of my eye.”  </Senza Titolo>

The film <Outwardly from Earth's Centre> by Rosa Barba was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Metz in 2016 and at Columbia University in New York in 2017. As the artist says: "It is based on the story of a fictitious society that lives in an unstable piece of land at risk of disappearing. A circumstance that demands collective action from the population to ensure the survival of both individuals and society. The imaginary setting is inspired by Gotska Sandön, a Swedish island in the north of Gotland in the Baltic Sea which moves about one metre per year. Moreover, fake reports by experts draw a surrealist picture of what is happening. The experience of what at first glance might seem like a beautiful documentary develops into a more abstract and slightly absurd picture of the inhabitants' struggles and vulnerability." </Outwardly from Earth's Center>

Realised on the occasion of a major exhibition for MAXXI in Rome in 2009, Hans Op De Beeck's <In Silent Conversation with Correggio – Nocturnal Sea> is a large watercolour on paper of 134.4 x 244.7cm. It was inspired by the work of Correggio, a Renaissance artist who ideally broke through the dome of Parma Cathedral in 1524, and perhaps reached the peak of perspective wisdom in painting. In his 2009 artwork, Hans Op De Beeck recalls the humanist wave that exploded in Europe in the past, reconstructing its distant echoes and taking them back to his Flemish culture of origin. Born in Turnhout in northern Belgium in 1969, he reaps the benefits of perspective on the shores of a cold but soft, silent but imposing, Nordic sea. There, the threshold between sky and sea, waves and clouds, and geopolitical boundaries is a thin line disappearing over the horizon. </In Silent Conversation with Correggio – Nocturnal Sea>

A horizon that we find again, albeit ideally, in Nedko Solakov's work. <The Passage (a commissioned artwork's story)> realised by the Bulgarian artist (Cherven Bryag, 1957) interpolates the simultaneity of two apparently disconnected fortuitous events. The death of his father and the meeting with two masters of art history during the exhibition Caravaggio and Bacon at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, between October 2^nd  2009 and January 24^th 2010. The artwork is made of two paintings installed four metres apart from each other and on two painter's easels connected by a series of floating writings created by Solakov in blue pen on a white wall. It is a bridge between life and death, between the past of memories and the future that awaits us.  </The Passage (a commissioned art work's story)>

Lorenzo Costa was Mantegna's successor at the court of the Gonzaga family in Mantua. In 1520 he created the wooden altarpiece of < St. Anthony of Padua and Saint Catherine and Saint Ursula > as an ethical, artistic and philosophical statement. Each character of the painting is like an ingredient. From St. Anthony of Padua he takes a pinch of purity and two handfuls of rectitude and humility, which are conveyed especially through the illustration of the Franciscan habit and the sacred scriptures from which the white lily sprouts; from St Ursula he takes 300 grams of coherence and 100 of fidelity to the Christian crusade – whose banner she protects; from St. Catherine he takes a drop of communion with the divine, her being the vessel of the trinity of father, son and holy spirit united in one body – a body which, in Costa’s interpretation represents the painting itself. </S.Antonio da Padova e le Sante Caterina e Orsola>

Gerolamo Lanino instead, brings us into the presence of Saint Michael the Archangel with a late Renaissance work. The Archangel, together with Saint Apollonia and a devout knight, pays homage to the Madonna with her Child. In his work, Saint Michael corresponds to the one “who must bind the false prophet into the flaming pond”, Saint Apollonia is the one “who prefers death to blasphemy”, while the Devoted Night is any observer – meaning us –  capable of distinguishing true beauty from false illusions. </ Madonna col Bambino, san Michele Arcangelo, Sant'Apollonia e un devoto cavaliere>

<These are all meta-narrative elements linked within the work originating from parallel social, political, economic, religious and cultural times and worlds>

Giacomo Balla was one of the greatest exponents of the Futurist movement, which developed between the two World Wars. In these terms, even his research can be read as a free and dynamic manipulation of “history” in a meta-narrative way. A history that can be considered not as something absolute and static to be described, but more like a process that constantly redefines events. Events that – as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari theorised in their famous 1980 book “Mille Piani” – can be reconnected according to a rhizomatic logic, generating new creative freedom.

This creative freedom emerged already in 1915 in the “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” manifesto written together with De Pero, when Balla stated the following: "We, Futurists, want to realise this total fusion to reconstruct the universe by cheering it up, that is, by recreating it in its entirety."

And then it re-emerges today in 2024, on the threshold of a third war of planetary proportions, in an exhibition curated by a cross-disciplinary artist and mediator that ironically closes with the 1916 work <La Guerra>, but re-proposed in an explicit pacifist key. </ La Guerra>

</Meta-Links >

Artists: 

Giacomo Balla, Rosa Barba, Vanessa Beecroft, Hans Op de Beeck, Giotto di Bondone, Pierpaolo Campanini, Giorgio De Chirico, Lorenzo Costa, Jeppe Hein, Gerolamo Lanino, Nedko Solakov, Grazia Toderi.