The MAM (Museum of Modern Art of the Upper Mantovano) proposes the works of Manuela Bedeschi and Tiziano Bellomi. «Words and Numbers»: this is the title of the exhibition curated by Gianfranco Ferlisi. The exhibition starts from the garden with two works that anticipate and recite the poetics of the project. Overture: a rough reinforced concrete bench and a stone declare numbers, words and considerations. The bench we are talking about is not similar to the others. The word “Think”, affixed by Manuela Bedeschi, is as if it were biting into the buttocks of those who sit there, stimulating their creativity and mental lucubration. And after the curiosity created by the object comes the evoking force of the word. Then, on the loggias of the old house, the words written in neon by the author stand out in a silent dialogue: “look”, “listen”. Imperatives and warnings: advice for an ethics of respect for the planet. Imperatives of an art that asks materials unrelated to tradition, to “poor” materials, to turn into a source of inspired amazement. A little farther on, a “Numerical Stone” by Tiziano Bellomi, a stone from the nearby Veronese quarries, offers a surprising concept of sculpture. Above the stone, carved with Michelangelo’s commitment, a number in Arabic characters: «130». The bas-relief inscription occupies a small space if compared to the size of the rock mass. We are faced with a micro cataloging: it is the enunciation of the project for which the entire Villa Ippoliti is defined as a work of art. The numbered stone is the ideal trace of a simple and thoughtful conceptual action, which refers to all the previous attempts by the author to discover, redesign the world and appropriate it.

Once through the passage that passes through Villa Ippoliti, upon entering the museum, installations and works lead us to observe spaces in a different way and to look inside, or to look beyond. Other stones, other numbers refer to Bellomi’s innumerable interventions, to their play with the stereotypes of beauty: it is the work of de-aestheticization and formal essentialization. On the walls, his “Meridiani”, very recent works, recall, behind the vertical bands of painting, an explicit and inevitable reference to criteria, procedures and processes. Certainly works on canvas are the ones we observe but they connect and have their matrix in the “Boundary Lines”, installations located in various places in Italy. In fact, in its components of homage (starting from Mark Rothko), of irony, desecration and linguistic sabotage, painting presents geographic concepts and does so with an effective and high evocative temperature instrument. Are the coordinates of the meridians not numerical expressions? The combination of the names of cities and other “Meridians” leads beyond the initial hypnotic passage within the painting.

Finally, Manuela Bedeschi’s lights also pulsate inside, as if to create the dawn of a primordial world. “Redder” and “More orange”, two works from 2011, show, parallel to the installation, the vibrating glitter of the reflections of the neon lights that stretch on the walls and dematerialize the two canvases, with effects of rarefaction and evanescence. The author works on space, transforms it, intervenes with its increasingly stronger, more effective, more experienced, more felt, more conceptual creative energy. Form and content, essentiality and minimalism. Light and darkness combine to create the magic of color, whose delicate and subtle nature takes on the beauty of red topazes and precious rubies. The orientations of the artist’s work are therefore an expression of conceptual references.

A little further on, the “City names” by Tiziano Bellomi, an installation of small works, born on the basis of the protagonism of the inhabited places in the media and on the news, carry beyond the sequential number that, starting from the intervention on the Berlin wall, has developed a theorem of references with the coordinates of spaces, places and cities, physically identifiable according to obvious coordinates.

Ultimately, in their summation, we can speak of two exemplary experiences of contemporary artistic research.

Info:

Parole e Numeri
works by Manuela Bedeschi e Tiziano Bellomi
curated by Gianfranco Ferlisi
MAM 
via Marconi n. 126
Gazoldo degli Ippoliti (MN)
opening: Saturday 8 feb, h 17.00
until 8 March 2020
opening hours:
Monday – Saturday h 9.00 > 12.00
and Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, h 15.00 > 18.00
info: +39 0736 657141