Anish Kapoor and Giulio Paolini. An extraordinary combination on display in Brescia to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Galleria Massimo Minini, on the occasion of the celebrations for Brescia Capital of Culture 2023.
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini, installation view at Massimo Minini Gallery, ph Petrò Gilberti, courtesy Massimo Minini Gallery, Brescia
“A more minimalist than romantic combination” by Kapoor and Paolini is hosted in the spaces of the renowned gallery, in the exhibition which also establishes the story of a long and beautiful friendship, as it has almost always happened in the long career between the brilliant gallery owner and his many artists . But here’s what happens: two famous international masters of contemporary art, apparently very distant one another, unexpectedly converse, generating a particular and ineffable energy. The vision belongs to Massimo Minini, famous in the world of international collecting for having always been a reference and a promoter of projects for museums, publishing and institutions.
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini, installation view at Massimo Minini Gallery, ph Petrò Gilberti, courtesy Massimo Minini Gallery, Brescia
The gallery had already hosted the two artists several times with personal exhibitions, but the idea of combining the works of both came to Minini by chance, looking one evening at the works of Giulio Paolini that had been on display for two months in his space and which should have been dismantled. The idea of extending Paolini’s exhibition with this unprecedented encounter was positively received by both artists and thus the magnificent new exhibition was born.
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini, installation view at Massimo Minini Gallery, ph Petrò Gilberti, courtesy Massimo Minini Gallery, Brescia
Anish Kapoor (Mumbai, 1954) is present this time with his deep and absolute blacks, his reflective shapes, unfathomable mirrors, curves and voids that take, for example, the shape of a large vertical almond or an acute angle at the limit of the visible. Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940) reveals himself with his minimalist conceptual works, pencil traces, figures on white paper. An immaterial, rarefied and spatial art, where the delicate drawing of a man’s silhouette on the walls enters an enigmatic, mental dimension.
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini, installation view at Massimo Minini Gallery, ph Petrò Gilberti, courtesy Massimo Minini Gallery, Brescia
In the first room you immediately notice a Plexiglas parallelepiped that reproduces the volume of the same room in scale, while on the opposite wall you can observe the silhouette of a human figure from behind representing the artist, a part of which is drawn on a white sheet and the missing part is depicted on the wall. A metaphor exhibition of the contrasts of empty and full, of darkness and light, of Eros and Thanatos, in the mind of two masters.
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini, installation view at Massimo Minini Gallery, ph Petrò Gilberti, courtesy Massimo Minini Gallery, Brescia
“After all, what is art? We realize today that art has been like a great game for us: it’s the game of life, it’s the job of living”, Minini joyfully recounts at the inauguration, “It was precisely by looking at Giulio’s whites and voids that I identified this new exhibition, because for me it is “avec” and not “against”, continues the gallery owner. “The works on display are made for thinking. Certain things cannot be seen by definition. The black painting on the disk (the work of Kapoor ed) has nothing beautiful about it, but it activates the thought. It’s not about good or bad, it’s what comes to mind in front of a big black from Anish and which I call a black hole. Our figure is mirrored in front of the mirror and acquires three-dimensionality, on the borderline between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. Inside Kapoor’s black holes I believe there is life”.
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini, installation view at Massimo Minini Gallery, ph Petrò Gilberti, courtesy Massimo Minini Gallery, Brescia
The walls of the gallery, with elegant installations, mark a musical and mathematical rhythm, a collaboration between two minds which, as Minini says, is not a contrast but “the sum of two extreme and basic positions that integrate into a new status”. And for the gallery owner, the white work and the black work are “like a supernova and a black hole”, which invite us to dialogue with them also through the concrete and tactile elements. As Minini recalls, the light and energy that are released along this journey remind us of an important statement by Giulio Paolini: in reality, it is the work that looks at us and not vice versa.
Info:
Anish Kapoor/Giulio Paolini
16/02/2023 – 02/05/2023
Galleria Massimo Minini
Via Luigi Apollonio 68 Brescia
www.galleriaminini.it
Manuela Teatini, film maker and journalist, focuses on visual arts, in particular cinema, photography and contemporary art. She has written freelance for years with VOGUE, Uomo VOGUE, ELLE and other cinema, art and new trend magazines. She is the author and director of the docufilms “ART BACKSTAGE. La passione e lo sguardo” (2017),” MASSIMO MININI. Story of a Gallerist “(2019),” GIOVANNI BOLDINI. Il Piacere. Story of the Artist” (2021) awarded at the Terra di Siena International Film Festival 2021.
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