Casa Masaccio Contemporary Art
Casa Masaccio – Casa Giovanni da San Giovanni, Palazzo d’Arnolfo, Pieve di San Giovani Battista, Museo della Basilica
From 21 November to 31 December 2015
Curated by Giorgio di Genova
With the project entitled From the Municipal Collection of Contemporary Art: Marco Fidolini, Polyptychs 1983-2015 (Metropolitan Epiphanies), the Casa Masaccio Museum of Contemporary Art participates in the circuit of events and exhibitions organised by Toscana ‘900. Museums and art itineraries with an exhibition presenting a significant number of polyptychs painted after 1983
This event was organised with the intention of emphasising and providing greater visibility to the San Giovanni Valdarno Municipal Collection of Contemporary Art, consisting of works of art by artists who participated in the various editions of the Masaccio Prize from 1958 to 1968 (Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Fernando Farulli, Alberto Moretti, Francesco Guerrieri, Aldo Turchiaro, Sergio Scatizzi) and donations received over the Casa Masaccio’s thirty-year period of exhibitions.
In addition to the presentation of a number of works of art in the Casa Giovanni da San Giovanni exhibition space, where the collection is hosted, the project is developed with focus on one artist whose work is part of this collection, Marco Fidolini (San Giovanni Valdarno, 1945). Thanks to an exhibition set in various locations in the city of San Giovanni Valdarno, which will allow viewers to enjoy a comparison-encounter with Fidolini’s work and the historical architecture, as well as works of art preserved in the town, this event intends to offer a digression on the poetics of this artist, one of the leading figurative artists in Tuscany and Italy.
This exhibition presents a significant number polyptychs painted after 1983. Among them, the largest work of art (Metropolis) measures 1860 cm x 150 cm. Through a series of pictorial cycles created in the form of traditional polyptychs, the religious identity of which has inevitably been transformed into a secular vision of contemporary life, often still have panels that remind one of 14th century and Renaissance elements (compartments, altar-pieces, cymatium molding, predellas). An in-depth iconographic analysis of a metropolitan-industrial kind, in the fetishist exaltation of the artefacts and the architectures, reveals the presence-absence of mankind as the ‘biological object,’ with the increasingly illusory and ambitious civil and alarming intention of interfering with the human condition and existential disquiet. Images of our daily lives that ideally draw on the great Tuscan and northern Renaissance tradition, to then reach the metaphysical area of the 20th century or the German one akin to the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Magischer Realismus, and that move the suggestion and the sacredness of altar-pieces from places of worship, to the familiarity and functionality of ordinary locations. This series of polyptychs, having annulled their original sacredness for a new iconographic order, increasingly linked to the fascination-revulsion oxymoron of contemporary society, intends to interact with the customs and functionalities of our ordinary spaces. This event will be completed by the planned production of a catalogue dedicated to this exhibition and able to provide enlightenment as far as Fidolini’s work is concerned, thanks to a critical contribution by Giorgio Di Genova, author of Storia dell’Arte Italiana del ‘900, an important publication that proposes to address, from a generational perspective, all the Italian artistic experiences and personalities of our century, without neglecting the so-called “minor” ones.