2023-11-10 13:58:20
Time.news – Two exhibitions, with the Mediterranean at the centre, are the first act of the new governance of the Maxxi in Rome. The director of Maxxi Architettura Lorenza Baroncelli calls two different artists, but linked by the same origin and international vocation, to investigate the Mare Nostrum as a place of coexistence and dialogue, guardian of a common cultural and identity heritage that today more than ever it is necessary to reiterate. And the lens is that of art, architecture and design.
A Riccardo Dalisi (Potenza 1931 – Naples 2022), a year after his death, a retrospective was dedicated, while Mimmo Jodice is honored by the exhibition of a group of photographs from the Mediterraneo series, thus opening the autumn season of the new Maxxi Architettura programme.
“The challenge is to consider the museum to its full potential and be aware that cultural programming is an instrument of cultural diplomacy. A responsibility to be interpreted with drama and imagination, just as the two artists teach us”, underlines Alessandro Giuli, president of the Maxxi Foundation. “Dalisi and Jodice are united by a gaze on the Mediterranean, or perhaps we should say a look towards the South – explains Baroncelli – both had the ability to anticipate very current issues to the point that even today, perhaps especially today, their questions challenge us. Past and present intertwine in a timeless recurrence of themes and problems.”
‘Radically’, the exhibition dedicated to Dalisi, one of the most multifaceted Italian designers of the last decades, presents his work in its extreme variety and vastness for the first time, come on creative workshops with the children of Naples (those in the Rione Traiano are told by a series of photographs by Mimmo Jodice), to the revolutionary work in the field of design; from constructed architecture (such as the Goods Exchange in Naples, created with Michele Capobianco and Massimo Pica Ciamarra in 1964, or the creative restoration interventions in the towns of Irpinia hit by the 1980 earthquake) to the imagined one.
But they are also there paintings and sculptures, often in large format, in which the characters of Neapolitan and Mediterranean culture come to life. Exhibited for the first time is the Chickpea Chair, a series of drawings that Dalisi requested from, among others, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Ettore Sottsass, Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari, Paolo Portoghesi, Gae Aulenti and Hans Hollein, with the aim of starting point, the suggestion of a small chair made by a Neapolitan girl with scrap wood and a clothes peg, with a chickpea placed on it.
Among his most famous works is the reworking of the Neapolitan coffee maker, the result of research carried out between 1979 and 1987 for the Alessi company and awarded with the Compasso d’Oro. This research has generated, in addition to a model that went into production, hundreds of objects halfway between the coffee pot and the puppet, in which functional research, anonymous design and the ritual dimension of coffee merge, in the form of “Totocchi” ( Totò + Pinocchio), warriors, knights, robots, Pulcinella and other fairy-tale and mythological characters.
Through drawings, sketches, furnishings, embroidery, objects, books, sculptures, paintings, photographs, archival documents, films and other materials, we discover the radical and revolutionary character of his work, which blossomed in the cultural and artistic climate of Naples in the Sixties and Seventies, an expression of a Mediterranean style resistant to a homogenizing and failing modernity nourished by much broader influences, from a geographical and disciplinary point of view which the exhibition aims to enhance.
‘Mediterraneo’, then, is one of Mimmo Jodice’s best-known projects (Naples, 1934), Neapolitan author among the greatest interpreters of contemporary photography. From 10 November 2023 to 14 April 2024, the Maxxi Architettura Archive Center will exhibit a group of vintage photographs from this series, which have become part of the museum’s Photography Collection thanks to the contribution of thethe Friends of Maxxi.
Also on display are archive documents, contact sheets, interviews, study and bibliographic materials to delve deeper into the genesis of the project, developed by Jodice during the ’80s and ’90s when, after the experiments of the ’60s and ’70s, develops a growing interest in the themes of the ancient, of memory, of origins and at the same time specifies his poetics centered on the concept of “getting lost in looking”, that is, chasing visions that are located outside of reality.
All this translates into various projects dedicated to Mediterranean culture and archaeology, which begin with an initial exploration of the area closest to him (Paestum, Neapolis, Pompeii, Cuma, Baia) and then extend to the Mare Nostrum – from Greece to Tunisia, from Jordan to Libya – to museums around the world.
The meeting with the athletes of the Villa dei Papiri at the Archaeological Museum of Naples around 1985, witnessed in the exhibition by a video of the time, represents a turning point for this research, which was systematically resumed in the nineties and found full international recognition in a major exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1995.
In ‘Mediterranean’ the faces and bodies of the statues, as well as the architecture, the landscapes, the ancient ruins, the myths, are transfigured through deep shadows, moved surfaces, sudden flashes, thinning and dilation of the contours created through skilful movements in the darkroom , which restore the expressive dimension of Jodice’s language.
The difference between the specimens, presented in the display cases, and the final work highlights the uniqueness of each print and the complexity of this process, told by the author himself in an unreleased video produced by the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.
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