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Exhibition Details

PRESS KIT
 

After their debut at the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in the early 1980s, Bertozzi & Casoni, now known internationally, return to exhibit within the walls of the gallery. The main theme of the exhibition is the tribute to Giorgio Morandi, presented both with a selection of "Fiori" and "Paesaggi" by the Maestro, both with real "d'aprés Morandi" and the duo Bertozzi & Casoni has created by interpreting and filtering the Morandian lesson through ceramics, their favorite medium. In these works by Bertozzi & Casoni, not only does the lighted palette become pastel, but their investigation into vanitas and transience - always conducted through snapshots of flora and fauna and leftovers of the civilization of consumption - also involves Morandi's flowers, which they interpreted they hide among the petals a presence of life with changing colors: small insects ready to transform themselves into an ambiguous puzzle, which leaves the door open to more answers.
What Giorgio Morandi pursues throughout his life is a pictorial investigation conducted on a very series of reduced subjects: still lifes of bottles, vases of flowers and the landscape of Grizzana, locality of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines where the artist spent the happy months. They are images of the newspaper notes a all, which for Morandi constituted a mere formal pretext. It is precisely the banality of these subjects that it allowed the Maestro to focus attention on the pulsating core of his research: composition of the space understood as the environmental unit of all the elements that make it up. A space felt like interior place, which sign after sign took shape on the engraved plate or on the canvas. A space rebuilt, so that its infinite duration could be stolen and certainly not its instantaneousness: this is why when Morandi he painted landscapes never returned to the same glimpse of nature and that is why the flowers he preferred did not they were the fresh ones, destined to change day by day, creating variations independent of hers will, but dried or silk flowers, which just like the other protagonist objects of his still lifes, they would have kept their state unaltered, creating a multiplicity of tonal effects thanks to the powder that it would gradually settle there. The temporal suspension is present in each and every one of his works this placing oneself on the edge of the flow of time makes the lesson of the great Master current today.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Maggiore g.a.m. intends to give space to the interpretation that the duo of artists contemporaries Bertozzi & Casoni creates on Giorgio Morandi's iconic flower pots. The predilection present in all the works of Bertozzi & Casoni for flora and fauna, together with the focus on the iconographic themes of vanitas and memento mori that characterize their research, have made the Morandian theme of flowers a subject ideal to be interpreted through a multitude of evocations. If Morandi observed reality to grasp it the abstract essence, recording it in timeless images, Bertozzi & Casoni transfigure it three-dimensionally thanks to ceramics: "matter" par excellence, which once manipulated is posed as the presential sign of a snapshot captured in hyper-realistic forms, reconstructed in the smallest detail. But just as the antipodes at the end of the tour end up meeting and then getting confused, it is possible to trace the elements of continuity that run between Morandi and Bertozzi & Casoni: the ambiguity played between life and absence of life and between instantaneity and suspension, together with the centrality of one's inner world for interpreting the real. If in fact, Morandi's works focus on a few subjects to suggest an image mind preserved and reactivated by memory, Bertozzi & Casoni also choose certain sets of objects through a careful look to look for a link between the observed aesthetic form and the state of mind that moved the search. Less is more then becomes a maxim capable of telling us about the poetics of these artists so apparently distant: the Master's concentration on those few, repeated subjects marks the greatness of his research, while the works of Bertozzi & Casoni allow us to probe with adequate pay attention to the wealth of tactile and visual information that makes them the ironic and disillusioned singers of society accumulation and hyper-productivity.
 

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