Another important and concrete sign of the commitment of the Il Circolo della Bontà Foundation alongside Asst Sette Laghi. From today 30 September 2024, a sculpture of the master will be erected in the square next to the entrance to the Circolo hospital in via Guicciardini Paolo Borghi. The work, entitled “Suspended Lives” marks the first step towards setting up a space dedicated to local art in that place after the creation of a mural by Andrea Ravo on an adjacent tower and the restoration and exhibition of a seventeenth-century painting by Francesco Torriani in the hall of the same hospital. The project is called “CurArti”.
The Foundation also donated the setting and installation of the statue, accompanying it with benches and historical notes. «We are not only grateful to Paolo Borghi and his family, but also honored to kick off the open-air sculpture project in front of the Circolo di Varese hospital with an internationally renowned artist – says the president Gianni Spartà –. We have asked and continue to ask local masters to interpret the human story where it is most intense with interior involvement: hospitals.” “Suspended Lives” comes after the seventeenth-century “San Carlo who gives alms to the poor” which has been installed in the hall for two years and the “San Sebastiano curated by Irene” by Andrea Ravo, ace of street art, also at the entrance to the club. «How do we combine our commitment to improving the quality of time spent by patients in the Asst Sette Laghi hospitals with the development of the “CurArti” project? With the awareness that art touches the spirit, is part of care, and that hospitals, in the Italian tradition, have always been places of civilization, treasure chests in which beauty is preserved, meeting points between public service and community, according to theories of the economist Stefano Zamagni, in Varese on 24 October as a guest of our Foundation”, adds the president of the Foundation itself. In turn, the general director of the Asst Sette Laghi, Giuseppe Micale, is keen to say: «I thank the Il Circolo della Bontà Foundation, which has been alongside ASST Sette Laghi for years, taking care of our professionals and, directly and indirectly of our patients. Alongside donations and projects of immediate use, such as the provision of coin-operated wheelchairs in the hospital hall, the library service, up to the large donations in technology during the Covid years, the Foundation also invests in beauty and hospitality , through the “CurArti” project which today is enriched with a new piece. After the work of Ravo Mattoni and the installation with the beautiful seventeenth-century canvas restored in the Monoblocco hall, here is the renovation of the small square in front of the entrance to the Circolo Hospital. I find that Paolo Borghi’s statue fits perfectly into the context and creates a narrative with the other works, which we obviously leave up to each visitor to interpret. The entrance to the Circolo Hospital now has all the characteristics to rightfully enter the city’s tourist guides.” Gianni Spartà highlights the “perfect understanding” with the general management and the technical offices and thanks the architect Adriano Veronesi for the installation of the work and the art historian Anna Maria Ferrari for the consultancy provided: “This is a gift which on behalf of our communities we dedicate to patients, doctors, nurses and managers of the Varese healthcare system with an affectionate thought” concludes the president of the Il Circolo della Bontà Foundation.
THE AUTHOR
Paolo Borghi was born in Como in 1942, son of Stanislao, an established goldsmith and engraver of Como origins; he trained by following courses in architectural drawing and painting at the Brera Academy and in sculpture at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. In his sculptural production he chooses the figurative dimension, following the path traced by the classical tradition. The web of iconographic suggestions and references to artists of the past is very dense, indicative of a profound culture and a complex comparison with the art of Baroque, Symbolism and Surrealism in particular. Fascinated by the monumental scale, Borghi has attempted large-scale works that dialogue with space, such as the five monumental sculptures created in 1987 in Dallas (Texas, United States), then sold to the Mola Center in Los Angeles. In the same year he created the statuary group of Apollo and Daphne, located in the building complex called The Crescent, designed by the architect Philip Johnson in Dallas. Borghi’s collaboration with the architect Paolo Portoghesi was long and fruitful, for example in the new Civic Cultural and Social Center in Poggioreale, in the province of Trapani, and in Palazzo Corrodi in Rome, in the nineties, as well as in the church of Santi Cornelio and Cipriano in Calcata, Lazio, between the first and second decades of this century. The collaboration with Portoghesi continued in the co-cathedral of S. Benedetto in Lamezia Terme between 2018 and 2019. Portoghesi, a leading exponent of Postmodernism, identified in Borghi “the de-construction of the myth as the objective of a highly original plastic research”; the artist breaks down and recomposes the references to the past and to myth in particular, in unprecedented and always new syntheses. An internationally renowned artist, Borghi has obtained prestigious commissions such as that of the monument created in 2005 in memory of Archbishop Óscar Romero in the metropolitan cathedral of San Salvador in El Salvador and that of a group of statues placed in the mausoleum dedicated to Sun Myung Moon in Cheon Jeong Gung Museum in Gapyeong, South Korea, created between 2011 and 2016. During his career Paolo Borghi has been invited to important exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and has exhibited his works in important contemporary art fairs such as Art Basel, Tokyo Art Expo and FIAC in Paris. Among the numerous awards received, we highlight the prestigious Franco Cuomo International Award awarded to him in 2023 “for material and formal research in a dialectic between classicism and anti-classicism”. In the same year, an important retrospective exhibition was held in the Governor’s Palace in Parma which brought together more than 80 graphic works and sculptures made in marble, terracotta and patinated bronze, proof of a refined and eclectic talent. Suspended lives
THE WORK
“Suspended Lives” belongs to a series of sculptures, balanced between high relief and sculptures in the round, on which Paolo Borghi has been working for years. These are human figures, often in pairs, who seem to float in space almost freeing themselves from the background plane of the matter to which they are connected; they also take on a pictorial connotation, given by the lively chromatic patina. For the artist these sculptures are evocative works, to which he does not intend to attribute a fixed meaning; they arise from subjective impressions, extemporaneous visions that emerge in his imagination; the eye of the observer is left with the possibility of interpreting this visual solicitation thanks to his own sensitivity. The work chosen as part of the CurArti Project evokes the tension between darkness and light, a universal metaphor of the human story.
(note edited by professor Anna Maria Ferrari)