«When you [Antonioni] stated in an interview with Godard: "I feel the need to express reality in a way that is all but realistic", you expressed a correct approach to meaning: you do not impose it, you abolish it. Such a dialectical relationship lends your films great subtlety: your art consists in leaving the road of meaning constantly open, uncertain, as it were - out of discretion. In doing this, you fulfill the role of the artist as needed by our time: neither dogmatic, nor insignificant.» (Roland Barthes, February 1980)

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of the great master of Italian cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni. Our attention focuses in particular on the films La Notte (1961), L’Avventura (1960), and L’Eclisse (1962), known by the public as the “trilogy of existence” or “of incommunicability”.
These films, which constitute what may be one of the most intense and meaningful pages of film history in our country, concentrate especially on the difficulty of human relationships in our age, on incommunicability and the tensions in a couple’s relationships.

Special attention is paid to female characters. As is well-known, in all three films a key role is played by a superb interpreter, Monica Vitti.
For this project we invited three artists who, despite working with different expressive languages, share a special interest in installation. Each artist worked on one film, trying to capture and interpret its artistic and cognitive message, and on the basis of it develop an independent work, something new in terms of language and content, but which could nonetheless relate to both Antonioni’s work, and to the other works on display.

Since each artist occupies a room in the gallery, the project developed more as three-artist show than a regular group show.

Elizabeth Aro (Buenos Aires, 1961, lives and works in Arona) presents two installations on the film La Notte; Claudia Maina (Milan, 1976) created an exhibiting path based on L’Eclisse; finally, I Santissimi (aka Sara Renzetti and Antonello Serra, born in Cagliari in1978 and still based there) focused on L’Avventura.

Each artist’s reading of Antonioni’s film was prompted by a natural affinity with their own work, and developed through a subtle play of references, whereby the film becomes the reading key for the work, and vice versa. All projects were designed and carried out focusing on specific scenes from the film, which are regarded as essential, or trying to grasp the general, deeper meaning of each work by the Ferrara-born master.

The exhibition program also includes a short retrospective screening of Antonioni’s trilogy at Cinema Centrale, in Turin, Via Carlo Alberto (dates still to be set).

Gagliardi Art System Gallery
Via Cervino, 16
Turin 10155 Italy
Ph. +39 011 19700031
gallery@gasart.it
www.gasart.it

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 3.30pm to 7.30pm