The exhibition Anatomia del Linguaggio, curated by Antonello Tolve, represents an interesting moment of deepening to understand more clearly the ways and the times through which Visual Poetry, in Italy, has constituted a not undervaluable research direction, maintaining both aesthetic autonomy which, at other times, contaminating itself with other artistic orientations.

Hosted at the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata and produced in collaboration with the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation, the event, being the largest and most complete overview ordered in the field of historical-critical research about Visual Poetry at a national level, allows us to observe, with relevance, how this was undoubtedly a significant creative experience but not always adequately addressed at the disciplinary level, perhaps because it is too often evaluated as an ancillary figure in comparison with contemporary conceptual dialectics; frequently organized into more demarcated groups.

As recognized, one of the distinctive stylistic attitudes of the artistic language of the Sixties/Seventies, those in which the phenomenon analisys develops however starting from the experience of the futurist “word in freedom” of Carlo Belloli, was the interdisciplinarity determined by the search for permeability among the various expressive territories. In fact, as the exhibition well describes by bringing together, for the first time, all those personalities who have moved and worked in Italy inside this area of experimentation, Visual Poetry, precisely because the cultural climate of those years was particularly multifaceted , has interested, sometimes even for a parenthesis of their activity, many artists who, in some cases, have hoarded this background to then pour it, often in a muted way, on achievements of different nature.

Such a widespread speculative breadth has provided, as a consequence, an equally large and heterogeneous number of interpreters which, as the cut of the project demonstrates, find in the development of problems related to language, speech, semiotics and graphics, the common operative denominator.

So, among the more than one hundred and twenty artists on show – among the many – we find Vincenzo Agnetti, Nanni Balestrini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Mirella Bentivoglio, Irma Blank, Tomaso Binga, Cioni Carpi, Giuseppe Chiari, Emilio Isgrò, Maria Lai, Ugo La Pietra , Ketty La Rocca, Maurizio Nannucci, Luca Maria Patella, Sarenco, Franco Vaccari, Luigi Viola. From the artworks visible in the exhibition, it is therefore almost immediate to perceive the extraordinary flow of poets, writers and artists who, in different ways, have adhered over time to the galaxy of Visual Poetry (in 1963 the Gruppo 70 was established in Florence and the Group 63 in Palermo), considering the word printed beyond its concrete physical character of type and the writing, not only in its primary function of meaning, the most effective instrument to penetrate the polysemic nature of the sign-image.

Therefore, in addition to redeeming, returning a satisfying reading, the Visual Poetry from a too often interstitial location in the history of contemporary art as a phenomenon with blurred contours, the exhibition, focusing on the plural possibilities of aesthetic reformulation and linguistic variation applied by the authors both in semantic and syntactic terms, it is able to indirectly set – according to the writer – also a reflection on how the universe of communication and of writing has changed and is, nowdays, becoming more and more standardized, converging – perhaps also because of a social declination and spreading of writing – towards excessively schematic and didactic forms.

Anatomia del Linguaggio awaits you until June 7th; enjoy your visit.

Info:

Anatomia Del Linguaggio
Uno sguardo sulla poesia visiva in Italia
a cura di Antonello Tolve
dal 7 Marzo al 7 Giugno 2019
Accademia di Belle Arti Macerata
P.za V.Veneto 5, Macerata