Guglielmo Spotorno, investigation of himself (and the universe) – Corriere.it

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Until 18 July Guglielmo Spotorno (Milan, 1938) with his exhibition Thought before color at the Malaspina Castle in Massa (which follows the personal Humanized cities at Palazzo Pretorio di Anghiari, Arezzo, just extended until 31 July) anticipates the themes of Expo Dubai 2020 which, after the postponement of a year due to Covid, will be inaugurated on 1 October (until 31 March 2022). And in particular that connecting minds, creating the future that there mission with which the Universal Exposition aims to call for collaboration for development and innovation.

Guglielmo Spotorno (Milan, 1938)

An anticipation that is not accidental since Spotorno also among the selected authors for theofficial event of contemporary art within the same Expo (title: Peace and love). And since, for Spotorno, everything seems to arise from a personal urgency for knowledge that brings together his art models (Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj, Wilfredo Lam, Graham Sutherland, Arturo Martini) to the attention for poetry and to the curiosity for everything contemporary / future (including development and innovation).


  Guglielmo Spotorno,
Guglielmo Spotorno, City without windows (2020, oil on canvas, detail)

an anxiety that manifests itself very early, at only 12 years old, in the young Guglielmo, who approached art by attending the Spotorno gallery, inaugurated in Milan in the 1960s by his mother Enrica, also a sculptor. Through his mother he met Martini, Casorati, Corsi, Sironi, Melli and young talents such as Ferroni, Forgioli, Francese. While it will be his chronic anxiety that in 1971 (while he was still working in the family business) he graduated in Theoretical Philosophy.

Spotorno’s works are purely informal in taste, in which the philosophical roots (Harmony and silence, Connections, From the triangle to the sphere). Works in which painting and poetry are constantly intertwined: At night I think a lot, I paint and when I’m done I put the picture in a corner. If I still like it when I come back to see it again, it means it’s okay.

The choice made at the Malaspina Castle by Giammarco Puntelli, commissioner of the event Peace and love for Expo 2020 and curator with Flavia Motolese of the Massa exhibition, it revolves around 40 works and three pictorial cycles of particular importance: research on reality starting from the sphere (leitmotiv Spotorno’s work) with the philosophical and theoretical references it implies; the theme of cities lived at the level of existential reflection in the field of cultural anthropology and human ecology; the sea as a poem, a life partner and a metaphor for feelings and reflections.

The Anghiari exhibition, on the other hand, wants to be a provocation given that in our citiesby now, there is little that is human: the paintings thus imagine metropolis uniformed in an aberrant globalization, places where pain and everyday life seem to intertwine in the solitude of modern life. With a symbolic work, around which the entire exhibition project revolves, City without windows: visual interpretation of how Covid has transformed homes into vertical prisons, depriving those who live there of autonomy and free will and accentuating social distances even more.

In the canvases exhibited in Massa as in those of Anghiari, Spotorno (a painter practically always as he likes to define himself) re-proposes his classic palette of colors and in particular that infinite series of variations of blue that has always characterized him: the blue of his Liguria, to which they have gradually gone alongside the black (of pain, suffering, death); gray (the passage, the suspension), small fragments of red, green, orange.
Not just colors for. Rather the umpteenth way to question the reality, the future. And on the (eternal) reasons for existence.

July 4th 2021 (change July 4th 2021 | 21:50)

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