Maestro torna Maestro is the title of a remarkable collection of critical interventions resulting from two days of discussion at the Brera Academy in 2010 about Luciano Fabro. In it, taking up a concept dear to Fabro himself, a particularly brilliant theory is outlined with respect to the system of glances and conversations involving artists who are also very distant in time and space. Art history, according to Fabro, is actually entirely a-historical, situated on the elliptical of an eternal present that brings together seemingly distant epochs and diverges years that are close in time and thought. Each artist, along his own path, compiles his own genealogy that has nothing to do with chronology, but with an authentic similarity that he perceives; and this compilation is a great responsibility, because it conforms like a true resurrection of the artists with whom he enters into dialogue, violently brought back to contemporaneity.
Installation view of the exhibition “Dove cresce il roveto” curated by Olmo Erba and Eleonora Molignani in collaboration with Giovanni De Lazzari, ph. ©️ Susanna Mattina
The exhibition Dove cresce il roveto (Where the bramble bush grows), curated by the artists Eleonora Molignani and Olmo Erba in collaboration with Giovanni De Lazzari, brilliantly showcases a conversation involving Trento Longaretti’s youthful sketches, made in the 1930s when the artist was still a student at the Brera Academy, and the works of seven artists and students from the Carrara Academy. The title alludes to the edges of the woods, to the ditches that cut the contours of the roads: liminal spaces suspended between the fairy-tale and the chaotic, impenetrable and attractive at the same time, subtly fascinating in their ambiguity of rustles and whispers. This concept is expressed in different ways throughout the exhibition: in Longaretti’s drawings, displayed in eight large folders that translate to the letter the way they were found by the curators during a visit to the headquarters of the Trento Longaretti Association, the bush is an undergrowth of spontaneous and quarrelsome signs, the intimate humus where the artist’s prolific pictorial activity was subsequently grafted; but then, as the viewer walks through this humus, the whole exhibition becomes the bramble bush that grows creaking, with blackberries and thorns, without ever losing this afflatus of intimacy that was in its premise.
Installation view of the exhibition “Dove cresce il roveto” curated by Olmo Erba and Eleonora Molignani in collaboration with Giovanni De Lazzari, ph. ©️ Susanna Mattina
The bush is, to borrow the words of the curatorial text, a dense tangle of unattainable imagery in the work of Filippo Cristini and the place where beasts hide in that of Chiara Brambilla; it becomes the stratification of signs in impassable maps in Bianca Bonaschi’s work, the impassable path of Marta Tessaroli’s views; the entanglement that envelops what is left behind in Natasha Rivellini’s work; an archetypal space where the animal is heard but not seen in Eleonora Molignani’s research and the precluded place of grotesque figures in that of Olmo Erba. The bush constitutes, for the entire time of the visit, a restless yet strangely comforting place, perhaps because, even in its most perturbing and sharpest declinations, it is rendered in a meticulous setting, which respects and welcomes the spectator without ever hiding behind easy codes that might constitute hiding places or artificial pedestals. Lastly, two further notes: one on the not insignificant political choice, i.e. of positioning, of situating oneself in a marginal context in a time of prominence; the other on the humble and historicized context of Monastero del Carmine, where the exhibition gracefully settles in, making criticalities into scenographic opportunities that visitors can inhabit without the continuity of their gaze ever being interrupted.
Installation view of the exhibition “Dove cresce il roveto” curated by Olmo Erba and Eleonora Molignani in collaboration with Giovanni De Lazzari, ph. ©️ Susanna Mattina
The viewer, at the end of the exhibition, returns a second time to the drawings by Trento Longaretti that opened it. And here he discovers, in keeping with the intuition of Luciano Fabro, with whom Trento Longaretti shared the teaching profession for a long time, the fulfillment of a timeless conversation that ended up transforming and enriching the experience of the Master’s work, just as Trento Longaretti had initiated the optics that permeate the pupils’ works. Striking and moving is the notion that Longaretti was, at the time his sketches were made, the same age that these emerging artists are now. Perhaps these glimpses that bring together otherwise incompatible eras and sensibilities also concern the lives of the artists themselves: in this sense, we can only hope that the bush of these artists’ research grows while maintaining all its inaugural power so that, at some point, we can turn around and recognize these first steps of theirs transformed and enriched by their subsequent paths.
Installation view of the exhibition “Dove cresce il roveto” curated by Olmo Erba and Eleonora Molignani in collaboration with Giovanni De Lazzari, ph. ©️ Susanna Mattina
Dove cresce il roveto can be seen at Monastero del Carmine until 27.10.2024 on Fridays and Saturdays from 5pm to 8pm and Sundays from 11am to 1pm and 4pm to 7pm. The exhibition is promoted by the Longaretti Association with Politecnico delle Arti of Bergamo and is part of the LONGARETTI VIVE program, aimed at enhancing the work and archive of Trento Longaretti.
Kamil Sanders
Info:
AA.VV. Dove cresce il roveto
19/09 – 27/10/2024
curated by Eleonora Molignani e Olmo Erba
Monastero del Carmine
Via Colleoni 21, Bergamo
Born in Venice in 1998, after graduating from high school, he moved to Milan where he studied painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2023 he published his first essay for the Calibano series by Prospero Editore: “Tradizione e Trasgressione. Note dall’India per un’arte indipendente”. In 2024 he won the Europa in Versi Giovani prize, which was followed by the publication in 2025 of his anthology “sillabario del terribile incanto” by Quaderni del Bardo Editore. He is currently attending the two-year course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at Naba in Milan.
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