culture
twelve o’clock, June 26, 2021 – 10:23 am
The prestigious Savoy castle in 2019 inaugurated the series on critics with Harald Szeemann. Now he continues with the “esoteric” Salerno
of Alessandro Chetta
Art criticism It’s me. Achille Bonito Oliva could follow the Sun King (or Flaubert), he would like the rest, at least for the fact that his name also comes to non-experts. Who remembers Venturi, Longhi, Brandi, Zeri, Celant, in the world of ordinary people? The man from Caggiano embodies his profession on a more or less popular level, as Louis XIV embodied the lineage of the absolutists. ABO is an acronym that has made its way over the years, tearing the most conformist part of the spirit of the time as one pulls away the dry grass. So an exhibition dedicated not to an artist but to an art critic may not cause the scandal. A protagonist who steals the show by saying «after all my closest enemy is the artist». Hosting it is the prestigious, Savoyard, Castello di Rivoli which in 2019 inaugurated the series on critics with Harald Szeemann. Now he continues with the “esoteric” Salerno, in the sense that for half a century he has brought together all his show within art where another pop critic, Vittorio Sgarbi, an “exoteric”, has also used art on the outside as a lever and as oxygen. Therefore, the Turin exhibition where, a not insignificant detail, Bonito Oliva donated his personal archive. The exhibition is entitled «ABO Theatron. Art or life “(until January 9, 2022) and curated by Andrea Viliani, former number one of the Madre and now head of the Research Center of the Castello di Rivoli, based on an idea of the director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and of the same Abo.
The exhibition
In the first room shines the flagship, the Transavanguardia, with selected works of “his boys”, those talents of which he was at least technical commissioner: Mimmo Paladino (“Silent I retire to paint a picture”), Enzo Cucchi (” Dogs with the tongue out walking “), Sandro Chia (” Sinfonia incompiuta “), Francesco Clemente (” The circle of Milarepa “), Nicola De Maria (” Head of the cosmic artist in Turin “). In practice, the Eighties that face a self-portrait by de Chirico and an anonymous Florentine of the ‘500 in the same space. Also seductive is Pino Pascali’s “Close up of lips”, present in the curator’s first exhibition at the Libreria Guida in Naples in 1966. The red room of Port’Alba, for him, like the Florentine Caffè Michelangelo for the painters of the stain. Bonito Oliva has often reiterated that Partenope gave him the language (and a law degree) and in addition a special relationship with Mario Guida, Lucio Amelio and Pellegrino Sarno. In the subalpine program there is no lack of audiovisuals: the film-interview signed by Irene Dionisio and a clip in which Abo talks on the phone with pop star Harry Styles. The rooms of the Castle, you will notice, if you wish to glide in Rivoli, are green with the very glamorous dress code of the various Gucci employees; the sage color renames them as keepers a theater gardeners (the fashion house is the main sponsor of the GucciFest project). In 28 the amarcord teases, for the series ‘when the exhibitions were epochal’. Such was in fact in ’73 “Contemporanea” set up in the parking lot of Villa Borghese in Rome, the sum of the first tests at the end of the 1960s, namely “Amore mio” at Palazzo Ricci di Montepulciano and “Vitality of the negative in Italian art 1960-1970” and prodromal at the Venice Biennale curated in 1993.
Viliani: great privilege and continuous discovery
Viliani says: «It has been a continuous discovery and a great privilege to dedicate myself in these two years to the study of an as yet unpublished archive such as the one that reconstructs Bonito Oliva’s over sixty years of critical and exhibition activity. Our exhibition is a milestone in Rivoli’s programming dedicated to the greatest curators of the twentieth century ». The curriculum of ours is so dense that it does not care about the Magna Carta; therefore it has been divided into three levels: exhibition curation, behavioral expression and public space (activities for radio, cinema and television) and full-bodied non-fiction writing. About the books: in ’76 with The traitor’s ideology Abo sensed the artist’s passage from creator to quotationist; foresaw the drift that today includes not only the artists but all of us arranged in boxes on social media. It goes without saying that his tutelary deity, besides Totò, could only be Duchamp, who put reality in quotation marks. With “Theatron” the octogenarian critic changes his skin again. «I have given substance to the criticism and I have removed the critic from his position of laterality. But the really interesting thing about this exhibition – he recently told the monthly Art – is my metamorphosis. From curator to curator ».
June 26, 2021 | 10:23
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