critical text by Donato Faruolo
The road from Florence to Byzantium, paradigmatic poles of Mediterranean art, passes through Basilicata, and thus through the crossroads of Venosa. Mediterranean contemporary art prize – The way through Lucania, the exhibition of the first edition’s winners of the biennial prize organised by the Porta Cœli Foundation (Venosa, Potenza), finds its happy realisation in the rooms of the Museum Casa di Giotto (Vicchio, Florence). But it is not only fortuitous coincidences that feed the significance of its journey.
The way to Vicchio has something of paradoxically “exotic” about it for the Porta Cœli Foundation, which has built its project around a decade of exhibition experience and familiarity with eastern Mediterranean art centres – Cairo, Qom, Lepanto, Yerevan and Doha. Precisely because of a counter-indication – in this case with happy outcomes – of what will be remembered as the pandemic of 2020, the Foundation and the territory it represents today have the opportunity to give new implementation to their relational aptitudes, building a moment of essential and significant synthesis, of symbolic completion of a parable, not depriving themselves of a series of fertile conjunctions that seem to narrate events necessarily related on the thread of the revolutions of the history of the Mediterranean. And this happens on the outskirts of Florence, in the house where Giotto was born.
In 2019, the first edition of the Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize was held in Basilicata, the prize that the Porta Cœli Foundation wanted to establish in order to imagine different axes around which to rotate our conception of European, Western and Mediterranean culture. The Castle of Lagopesole, a place of leisure and delight for Frederick II of Swabia – one of the spiritual fathers of a different Europe with its centre pointing towards the Mediterranean – was the significant setting: a building of splendid proportions and clear geometries, a pure projection in stone of an ideal model of the cosmos, it gathered around it, for ten days in July, a heterogeneous community of artists from literally every corner of the world (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Mauritius, United Kingdom, France, Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia…). An experience of informal and fruitful conviviality in the name of hospitality and dialogue, thanks to which the potential for election and centrality of a place that had been dormant for a few centuries was reactivated.
The year 2020 was to be the year of the exhibition planning of the first and second place winners in the various categories of the prize. The hypotheses for an appropriate venue for this project originally fell on the places of our unusual familiarity, some of which have been written off by the precipitation of horrible geopolitical situations (we think with dismay of the Armenian situation), others lapsed in any case due to the necessary precautions taken against the Covid-19. In recent months, many have learned to look more closely at what is close to them, sometimes rediscovering a transversal and non-hierarchical approach, in search of what is important that escapes the wide mesh of a cultural system that is unjustifiably flattened by the economic system. This corroborates the tendency already powerfully underway in the culture of the large centres to look outside their own areas of direct influence, in search of a rituality, an essentiality and a validity of cultural action that escapes the schemes of metropolitan productivity. “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis”, blessed is he who keeps away from the hustle and bustle: the path traced by Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the Latin poet born in Venosa in 65 B.C., who celebrated culture as a factor of emancipation and marginality as a factor stimulating circumspection and affirmation along new paths, is more useful than ever. Porta Cœli Foundation, starting from the eccentricity of Venosa, has always sought relations with the otherness of other longitudes: we can only look with confidence and industriousness at the hunger for relations with the otherness of the periphery that the global public expresses strongly today.
More and more often – and even before the pandemic – those who live in large cities choose to spend their work breaks or their cultural life time in places usually defined as ‘peripheral’. However, this is the search for places animated by a different concept of “centrality”, sometimes capable of compensating for that impoverishment of the “life of the spirit”, as Georg Simmel put it, whose care is entrusted to artists as it once was to the officiants of rituals, in a regime of division and specialisation of labour typical of modern society in which even the life of the symbolic and imaginary can be delegated, and in which the cultivation of the arts becomes a factor of vital importance. This is the first conjunction for which Vicchio and Venosa, in this panorama, find an extraordinary coincidence of intentions and vocation.
But there is a reason which, on closer inspection, seems to give greater specificity and significance to the relationship that this exhibition inaugurates between Vicchio and Venosa, and which takes us back to the road that leads from Florence to Byzantium. Vicchio is the birthplace of Giotto di Bondone, who has gone down in the history of world art as the man who “remutualised the art of painting from Greek into Latin”: abandoning the Byzantine artistic paradigm of hieraticism and transcendental suspension, he founded the modernity of western art on his passion for the real and for expression. Venosa, on the other hand, is the birthplace of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who describes his own poetic mission as an operation of cultural tradition of Greek poetic modes into Latin: ‘ex humili potens, princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos’, or ‘as a humble potentate, I was the first to lead Aeolian poetry into Italic modes’. Both become the initiators of a modernity, of an alterity from the rut of the society in which they live, starting from an alterity of their own deep roots.
On show, for the sculpture and installation category, Nemanja Popadic (Austria/Serbia, 1st prize) and Leandro D’Agnone (Italy, 2nd prize); for the photography category, Léna Piani (France, 1st prize) and George Zouein (Lebanon, 2nd prize); for the painting category, Amir Zarezadeh (Iran, 1st prize) and Lila KB (Argentina, 2nd prize); for the digital art category, Patricia Heuker of Hoek (Netherlands, First Prize) and Fiona Nòve (Mauritius, Second Prize); for the drawing, graphics and calligraphy category, Ilaria Moscardi (Italy, First Prize) and Michele Barbaro (Italy, Second Prize).
There is no point in forcing the polymorphism of the contemporary languages represented by the prize-winners into forced readings: the artists on show make up a scenario of blurred divergences, in terms of themes, techniques and approaches, geographical origins and age. But they are certainly united by a consistency of action that gives the works on show a credibility worthy of interacting with the good disposition of the visitor without false rhetoric, without fictions, without opportunistic superstructures. The selection made makes no attempt to recompose the scenario according to a law of coherence to the process implemented by the prize: instead, it is precisely in the possibility of allowing oneself to be crossed and to relate the diversity of artistic paths that the relational quality of the Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize is based, an opportunity to update and upset indexes, references and catalogues that will support the perennial circumspection activity of the Porta Cœli Foundation. We therefore refer to the motivations of the prizes that led them to this exhibition for a more in-depth look at the work of the individual artists
To close the exhibition, there is an appendix dedicated to the work of Antonio Masini. Recently deceased, he was the artist par excellence of the post-war period in Lucania. Without officially adhering to Guttuso’s realism or to the dreamy and atavistic atmospheres of the Transavantgarde, he somehow found a plausible and fascinating synthesis between the two ideological pillars, between the passion for a material that becomes an enigma and the sophistication of a myth that becomes the only possible explanation of the ineffable human.
Particular and intense, at times moving, is the suggestion that his work can be traced back to Giotto’s house: it is impossible not to imagine how curiously “Masini-like” the angels mourning the Scrovegni’s Dead Christ are in the In Masini there is the same passion that curves the backs and stretches the gestures, the same tension in the narrative through the image that becomes the emblem of myth, and even the same palette of ethereal, deep blues or carnal reds and browns, marked with red traces as was the practice of the mosaicists of Byzantium and Giotto. Between the flesh and expression of Giotto’s reformed art and the motionless sophistication of oriental icons, Masini presides over the right middle position of a Lucanian, in which even peasant humility becomes epic material.