It will be presented on Saturday 3 September, at 5.30 pm at the former Habsburg Imperial Prisons of San Vito al Tagliamento, the exhibition ‘Abstraction as Resistance’ by Roberto Floreani, artist, writer and performer. The exhibition project, which replicates the title and meaning of the essay published by De Piante Editore in 2021, arises from the need to recognize the salvific meaning of Art, after a long period of pandemic constraint and in today’s situation of great collective difficulty. The choice to build it in a perfectly preserved former prison (prison built in 1839 during the Habsburg rule) therefore assumes the important significance of the resistance of Art, compared to the materialist prison in which contemporary society seems trapped today, after having abandoned all depths. spiritual. The exhibition will remain open until October 16, 2022. The project is completed by‘Theatrical Action Abstraction as Resistance’ that Floreani will stage at the Antico Teatro ‘GG Arrigoni’ in San Vito on the evening of 29 September.
“A project that I really care about – says Roberto Floreani to time.news – and that I have managed to develop over the last two and a half years in which I have tirelessly sought a place of restraint that could help to understand the importance of freedom in art. after the lockdown. And at the end of the arduous search, the former Habsburg Imperial Prisons proved to be perfect “.
Why an exhibition? “Having decided to give a militant cut to the essay with the term Resistance, I decided that I would put all my potential at the service of the same purpose: pictorial, with the exhibition and performative, with the theatrical evening – explains the artist – title of the project as a whole could only bear the same title. The uniqueness of the project lies in the choice of the containment space with respect to the segregation of the lockdown, with the art giving a yearning for spiritual freedom… and each of the installations in the 8 cells will try to give a different idea … “.
The eight cells host as many site-specific exhibition solutions, each dedicated to a different series of Floreani’s works: from the Ritmati, to the Constellations, from the Prima Materia to the Candidi, where different sensations are alternated between them linked to the emotion generated by a strong presence. chromatic (Ritmati), from the introspection of the use of the suggestive Klein Blue (Prima Materia and Constellations), or from the mental dimension of the overlapping of white-on-white (Candidi). Mental conditions that favor that introspection capable of going beyond the walls of the prison that hosts them: a clear evocation of the inner dimension triggered by Art, as an antidote to the nihilistic cynical materialism that substitutes price for value, consolidated by suffocating communication one way.
The theatrical evening of 29 September will see Floreani accompanied by the music for piano and sampler by Renato Giaretta. A video will be shown, made with Roberto Sangineto, specially made for the occasion. The exhibition and the Theater Action are promoted by the Municipality of San Vito al Tagliamento, Department of Vitality, and by the STUDIO61 art gallery in Portogruaro.
Floreani born in Venice in 1956, lives and works between Vicenza and Padua. He has exhibited since 1981, after graduating from the University of Padua (1980), realizing, to date, over eighty personal exhibitions, of which over twenty are museums, in Italy and abroad. Already invited to the Rome Quadriennale in 2005, he represents Italy in the homonymous Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and today he is considered the reference abstract artist of his generation, present in numerous museum and institutional collections, published in the main Italian publishing series. He has been collaborating for over twenty years with various universities and academies, including the Sant’Anna University Institute of Higher Studies in Pisa, participating in conferences and giving lectures on Contemporary Art and the Historical Avant-gardes. Over the years, he has held various art therapy workshops at the Genoa-Quarto Institute of Mental Hygiene and the Paolo Pini Institute in Milan.
For over twenty years he has been producing multidisciplinary theatrical evenings, staged in the theaters of the main Italian cities. Alongside his activities as an artist and performer, Floreani also works as an essayist, publishing, among many others, I Futuristi e la Grande Guerra (2015) and Umberto Boccioni. Arte-Vita (with Mondadori-Electa, premiered at the University of Lisbon in 2017), both finalists at the Acqui Storia Prize of those years.