Time.news – A group show of 17 artists for the long goodbye Of Vittorio Sgarbi a Sutri. The Undersecretary for Culture presented “Triste, Solitario y Final”, the seventh exhibition organized by the mayor of the municipality of Tuscia which could also be his last, given that voting takes place in May and he may not run again.
“However, I will not leave Sutri that I love and will always love. I will remain the patron of this capital of soul and beauty“, he assured illustrating the exhibition at Palazzo Doebbing, the former bishop’s palace.
The title of the exhibition takes up that of a novel by Osvaldo Soriano which in turn is a quote from the ending of “The long goodbye” by Raymond Chandler. “When you leave you can only be sad, alone and at the end“, said Sgarbi who looks back on five years as mayor in which he admitted that more than ordinary management he has taken care to feed “the PC, that is the Culture Party”.
The critic then illustrated the collective exhibition created under the patronage of Intesa SanPaolo and explained how he chose the 17 painters and sculptors who range from different genres and eras, from the mid-1900s to the present day. “They would all deserve to be in Venice or Rome, indeed they would deserve even more and in this way people could see things never seen before”, said Sgarbi.
Some are known to the general public, starting from the corner reserved for Benito Jacovitti, the unforgettable cartoonist of the Vittorioso, dispenser of the unmistakable ‘salami’. Many others are “forgotten masters of the last century” to misunderstood artists of today. Sgarbi described them one by one, Pinot Gallizio “the Italian Pollock”, Saverio Rotundo, a street artist who defined the “Bernini of Catanzaro”, Bruno Canova “master of existential painting”, Gianfranco Ferroni “the Italian equivalent of one of the greatest living painters, Antonio Lopez Garcia”.
And again: Chiti Batelli “between De Pisis and Schifano”, Anne Donnelly, the Irish painter mother of the writer Margaret Mazzantini who wrote magnificent things about her art, the American painter Simon Gaon. And again Dyalma Stultus, Wolfgang Alexander Kossuth, Marialuisa Tadei, Filippo Bodrilla, Matteo Peretti, Marco and Roberto Ferri, “very different artists but united by their surname and their inner power” exhibited in two rooms facing each other.
Two Sicilian artists represented: Judge Johnwhose “singular figurative research stands out in the social scene between Lopez-Garcia’s painting and the luminescence of Guccione’s seas”, narrating “social unhappiness and natural happiness”, and an artist close to him in terms of language, Emanuele Giuffrida , “the Sicilian Hopper”.
“My works exhibited in Sutri, chosen by Sgarbi, tell my recent work between drama and enchantment, a look at Sicily where I live, mixed with parallel realities, my way of being realistic“, he explained to theTime.news Judge.
“In this corpus of works, the grotesque vision is no less, in addition to the serene bathers and the unfortunate migrants who land in Venice, a drawing, ‘Italian sea’, describes a landscape with figures floating in the water, an empty boat in open sea that does not know where to land, and a donkey enjoying the view under the shade of an olive tree…”.
In the room dedicated to Giuffrida, also from Gela like Iudice, nine works created in different periods are exhibited, “an existential story of man through the representation of internal/external spaces, presences/absences”, in an evolution held together by ” a single ‘faith’ of figurative rigour”.
The exhibition is a project by Contemplazioni and will remain open until October 1st.