The IV edition of Panorama, the widespread exhibition organized by ITALICS, has just ended. Since 2020, ITALICS has been connecting ancient, modern and contemporary art through a network of more than 70 galleries, linking them with areas and territories usually excluded from the hectic circuit of mass tourism.
Panorama Monferrato 2024, photo ® Louis De Belle, courtesy ITALICS
A timid sun, on a mild early September day, highlighted the contemplative nature suggested by the “meditation path” drawn through the four villages in Monferrato, gently nestled on the hills and wrapped in the green of vineyards as far as the eye can see. After the experiences of Procida, Monopoli and L’Aquila, Carlo Falciani curated the fourth edition of Panorama, and for the first time, his project received the privilege of further segmenting the exhibition route into four stages and sixteen locations, permeating the variety of selected frames (institutional palaces, private residences, castles and underground spaces) at all levels with the noble goal of keeping the dialogue with the territory active and vibrant. The curator’s admirable intuition – inspired by the European best-seller by Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione (1574) – was to create four thematic strands within the overall exhibition, guiding the contemporary traveler along a path of progressive dematerialization through about sixty works. The selected towns for the widespread exhibition were Camagna, Vignale, Montemagno, and Castagnole, all intentionally very close to each other, allowing for the possibility of visiting them all in one day.
Panorama Monferrato 2024, Comune di Vignale, Cantina Sociale, photo ® Louis De Belle, courtesy ITALICS
The first stage, dedicated to the theme of Work and Roots, took place in Camagna, where the main hub was hosted inside the former Cottolengo, and where, among the anvils of anonymous weapon masters from the last century and Franco Vimercati’s Sulle Langhe series, «it’s not strange to still feel some presences» said curator Falciani. The most effective dialogue on this theme was undoubtedly the one that compared the Piedmontese territory, in the beautiful photographic series by Moira Ricci (Dove il cielo è più vicino, 2014), with the patient weaving work by Maria Nepomuceno (Untitled, 2010), a metaphor for oral transmission and the perpetuation of ancient traditions. The first edition of Guazzo’s manuscript was also displayed in the building’s small rooms, like a modern Virgil, returning to center stage with his book, in subsequent editions in the following stages.
Panorama Monferrato 2024, Vincenzo Agnetti, installation view at Vignale, Palazzo Callori, ph. Cosmo Laera, courtesy ITALICS
In Vignale, in the beautiful setting of Palazzo Callori, a medieval building recently restored and opened exclusively for the occasion, the dialogue between ancient and contemporary focused on Portrait and Identity, themes that are in excellent health despite their millennia-long tradition. Perhaps the most significant work summarizing both concepts was Susana Pilar’s project (Lo que contaba la abuela…, 2017), which, by portraying herself, her mother and the women of her family, occupied a good portion of the noble floor, in an immersive play of mirrors that prompted each of us to search for our own reflection, questioning our origins and the space we occupy in the world. In nearby rooms, Vincenzo Agnetti (Ritratto di Equilibrista, 1970; Ritratto di Ignoto, 1971 and Ritratto di Missionario, 1971) and Markus Schinwald (Saks, 2016) instead reflected enigmatically on the concept of identity through subtraction.
Panorama Monferrato 2024, installation view at Castello di Montemagno, ph. Cosmo Laera courtesy ITALICS
The third stop in the journey, at the Castle of Montemagno, led us to a profound reflection on the themes of Fleetingness and Death, using every available surface, especially in the underground spaces, hidden in crypts, or protected by the tunnels of dungeons. On this occasion, we breathed the constant tension between earth and sky, between the “real,” understood as tangible, immanent, and the “false,” referring to what is unreachable, spiritual or transcendent. Bagnoli’s sculpture titled Il Cielo copre, la Terra sostiene, 1989 (2023), for example, with its balloon-like form, seems to reach upwards toward an undefined elsewhere, while Vezzoli’s ironic tricked sculptures (Camelia, 2020) bring us back to the here and now, referencing the funeral rite and our meager human and perishable dimension. Of great impact, however, in the secret space of the Voltoni Scalea Barocca, where the ossuary is still preserved, was the dialogue between the Claire Fontaine collective with Untitled (No Present), 2013, and Marzia Migliora’s installation (Prey, 2020), which displays a block of salt tragically harpooned like a white whale. The mirage of the forest in Run Fast and Bite Hard (entre chain et lup), 2022, suggested by the sound intervention by cinema foley artist Marco Ciorba envelops the environment in a surreal and fairy-tale atmosphere, giving Migliora’s work and the crypt itself a spectral connotation.
Panorama Monferrato 2024, Maria Elisabetta Novello, “Nel tempo che tace”, 2024, installation view at Castagnole, Casa della Maestra ph. Cosmo Laera courtesy ITALICS
The final stage, that of complete dematerialization, which unfolded in Castagnole, was dedicated to the theme of Sacredness of Art, even in its secular form. And it’s important to emphasize this oxymoron because, in fact, the small village – almost completely depopulated, like the previous ones – stands out for the mix between the sacred aspect of the abandoned houses and the jovial and rubicund humanity encountered along the path. To further emphasize this essential connection: the constant presence of felines, who move stealthily and sinuously among the ruins, like elegant, otherworldly figures, chosen guardians of lost souls since ancient Egypt. The references to the “dust of the past” were masterfully told at Casa della Maestra, through Fausto Melotti’s sculpture (Contrappunto Piano, 1973) in dialogue with Giorgio Morandi (Fiori, 1942) and the giant site-specific work by Maria Elisabetta Novello (Nel tempo che tace, 2024) made with the stratification of dust (and time). The journey ends at the former Asilo Regina Elena, where Invernomuto’s hypnotic sound installation (Pannocchia 2016-2024) establishes a true boundary between the world of the living and sacred art. To leave us with some precious reflections on the importance of sharing and passing down the history of places, to learn from our mistakes, is Pirri’s mirrored floor (Passi, 2024), which, with necessarily uncertain steps, leads us to Luca Vitone’s immaterial intervention (per l’eternità, 2013), an apparently empty room instead filled with a pungent fragrance – made from aromatic herbs mixed with the acrid smell of asbestos – and thus inhabited by the absence of victims of an invisible enemy, which in still-too-recent times has afflicted these areas.
Giulia Russo
Info:
PANORAMA MONFERRATO
Camagna, Vignale, Montemagno e Castagnole
4–8/09/2024
curated by Carlo Falciani
Italics Art and Landscape
https://italics.art/progetto/
Giulia Russo is an author and digital editorial assistant for Juliet, with whom she has collaborated since 2017. More recently she has been a contributing editor on cultural themes for various magazines, with critical insights, dedicated to emerging artists and the new frontiers of contemporaneity. Graduated in Art History at La Sapienza University of Rome, she specialized in Visual Cultures and curatorial practices at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Based in Milan, with some fleeting forays into Tiber, she loves listening to stories that she occasionally rewrites
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