The Lasting

The first exhibition at the renovated Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome opens like a book and plays on a sort of duplicity, where the artworks seem to speak to one another about time.

Crossing the threshold of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, we are immersed in a diffuse, constant light that offers immediate solace to the eyes and mind. After years of cold, austere, artificial illumination, the white marble of the impressive art museum designed in 1911 by Cesare Bazzani has finally come back to envelop the visitor by refracting soft rays of sun.

This refound glow instinctively brings back to memory the atmosphere of two important divisionist paintings that belong precisely to the Galleria: La creazione della luce (1913) by Gaetano Previati and Il sole (1904) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. Their ambience reverberates as we are drawn into the space, underlining the relation of continuity, maintained since its birth, between the museum's art collection and its architecture.

Cristiana Collu has been the museum's director for less than one year now, and “The Lasting” is her first exhibition at the renewed Galleria. She had the foyer, the Salone delle Colonne and the Salone Centrale revamped “by subtraction”. “I acted like an archaeologist,” she says. “I wanted to highlight, to bring things to light, so I had all the superfetation that had accumulated over time removed, with the idea to return to the original state.”

Heavy, dark drapes hanging in front of the entrance arcade impeded light from penetrating into the foyer. The central ticket counter blocked the view before you even accessed the space. Now, with their riddance, the conjunction between outdoors and in has become a welcoming salon, open to everyone, not just paying visitors. You can even spend an entire afternoon comfortably seated on the couches of the Salone delle Colonne, which is conceived as a thoroughfare area, a genteel prelude to the visit. Here, thanks to the designer Martí Guixé, you can enjoy a coffee at a small bar station or in two lateral courts equipped for this purpose.

“The priority was to bring visitors back to the Galleria, allowing them to temporarily inhabit the spaces without being forced to see the shows. No ticket is necessary to frequent the entrance rooms, so the entire operation has been a restitution to the city of a museum that is exquisitely public,” Collu adds. The approach to the interior decoration is simple, showing a mix of past and present. In the Salone delle Colonne, the large rug and pastel sofas were uncovered in the storage rooms, while the contemporary pieces were designed along the lines of lightness and removability.

“I chose Guixé because I wanted maximum simplification with two key concepts: openness, meaning communication between indoors and out, and intuitive hospitality; and a low-budget appeal, but one with taste, combined with reversibility, the possibility to use this furniture in a different way, meaning that it needed to be easy to move. The elements are rather anonymous, reminiscent of modular concepts from the 1950s. They echo shapes seen here in the Galleria’s offices. They are finished in natural oak, like the flooring of the entire Galleria. The words stencilled on the furniture are hand-drawn in the elegant letters of the Bodoni typeface that is used to sew together the whole sequence,” Collu explains. In short, the first reorganisation phase of the large museum is similar to a subtle “velvet revolution” guided by a clear, conceptually strong vision, executed with minimal changes that have maximum effect.

“Since its origin, this room has always been reserved for exhibitions, not the permanent collection, so I wanted to revamp it with this function in mind,” continues Cristiana Collu. “The exhibition's subject matter is the exploration of time, which will also be at the centre of the upcoming programme. 'The Lasting' is offered as the introduction and finale of 'Time is Out of Joint', the show that will mark the Galleria's definitive opening on 10 October. The theme of time as a disjointed and non-chronological phenomenon is well-suited to Rome, where temporal and cultural stratification is what constitutes the city.” “The Lasting. L'intervallo e la durata” is dedicated to the importance of the concept of time in the poetry and practice of art. On view are over 30 pieces by 15 Italian and foreign artists of different generations, prevalently contemporary. The artwork is juxtaposed with a few selected pieces from the Galleria's permanent collection.

“The Lasting. L'intervallo e la durata” is dedicated to the importance of the concept of time in the poetry and practice of art. On view are over 30 pieces by 15 Italian and foreign artists of different generations, prevalently contemporary. The artwork is juxtaposed with a few selected pieces from the Galleria's permanent collection. For “Time is Out of Joint”, this process will be inverted. The renewed 19th and 20th-century collection will be juxtaposed with a few pieces by contemporary artists.

“The Lasting was conceived and made to measure for the gallery space,” says its curator, Saretto Cincinelli. "In the past, the displays in the Salone were all positioned at eye level. Our idea was to break that horizontality and use the vast room as a whole.” This decision comes into its own in Elizabeth McAlpine's work – 150,000 stills from one movie, cut and stacked in piles like a minimalist sculpture – and Daniela De Lorenzo's sartorial patterns. Another piece that naturally goes along with this new approach is the hanging mobile by Alexander Calder.

“I established cornerstones from the collection. I wanted Calder for the movement. Jean-Paul Sartre identified him as the artist who brought movement to sculpture. The work, left to its own devices, does not feign movement, but offers it to the event, to the air itself. I chose Lucio Fontana for his canvas-related gesture and for his sculptures called Concetto spaziale-natura, where the cut is a breaking point, an interval. Finally, I chose Medardo Rosso for his tracing out of a modulation in which the sculpture tells how it was made and becomes a model of the process,” says Cincinelli.

The exhibition opens like a book and plays on a sort of duplicity, where the artwork seems to converse on the subject of time. The dialogue commences between Hiroshi Sugimoto and Barbara Probst, two artists who work specifically with the concept of time. “In her four photographs, Probst shows a man photographed by four synchronised cameras positioned at four different angles, so even if the subject is the same, each one tells a completely different story. The instant is perpetuated, and what counts in this case is the potentiality of the infinite. Sugimoto, on the other hand, eternalises the fragment by erasing the filmic story and creating a piece of work that contains the entire story in one single shot. These are two opposite procedures, but one does not exclude the other,” says Cincinelli, the curator.

Then there is Clessidra by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, an artist from the Veneto region. To make it, he took used wooden bricole, Venetian mooring poles eroded by the tides. Here he has chosen one that has been consumed to the breaking point. He made a mould of it and cast it in bronze, then replicated it and united two of them to form the shape of an hourglass. “The idea stems from the real effect created in canals when the water is flat and the pole is reflected as in a mirror. The element of positive-negative contained in the mould and the effect of the doubling make this the piece most obviously connected to the subject of time,” explains Cincinelli.

The young artist Giulia Cenci works with ephemeral garden furniture, speeding up and helping along its decay. Her prematurely deteriorated objects look like they have had a long life. Other work by Cenci is silicone-covered fruit. Here, the natural element dries up, leaving an air chamber between the original fruit and the shrivelled shape, becoming a modern memento mori.

“This piece enters into an exchange with the whole lower part of the display – the work by Fontana, the small houses by Andrea Santarlasci that seem generated by the great glass mother. The little structures look like a budding, as if the model had produced a series of doubles and disproportionate similars that lie scattered over the floor of the Galleria,” describes Cincinelli.

The photograph series by Franco Vimercati, a friend of Ugo Mulas and Enrico Castellani, is impressive. Vimercati worked as a painter in Milan in the same years as they did, and then broke off his official practice to undertake a sort of semi-secret activity, obsessively taking photos of the same objects, elementary shapes found around the house: a pitcher, a fruit bowl, a bouquet of dried flowers. He turned the making of the pictures into an extremely long process. “We could consider Vimercati the Giorgio Morandi of photography. I included his work for its almost compulsive duration of the object, conceived as an act to be repeated over and over,” Cincinelli says.

The idea that Father Time is a great painter lies at the base of the decision to include Antonio Fiorentino in the show. He takes sheets of zinc and immerses them in a solution of lead and vinegar water. When the blank zinc comes into contact with the solution, it produces a kind of continuous bloom that develops very slowly, triggering a chemical process – one that Renaissance alchemists used in their attempts to turn lead into gold.

“It’s the idea of a changing landscape whose mutation process cannot be seen with the naked eye. Seemingly, everything is static, while in reality everything is in motion. We could call it an effect of fixity. It is like what the French semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas called silent transformations,” offers Cincinelli.

Also Emanuele Becheri (1973) works with natural elements. His most famous work uses spiderwebs. He traps the delicate weave with adhesive paper and removes it in a way similar to the strappo technique used for frescoes. The result is a photograph made without a camera, an X-ray made by contact with the object.

"We wanted to say something about duration in the exhibition by selecting Becheri's work with snails. To make Senza titolo #7 e #13 (Shining), Becheri placed snails on the canvas and let them move around freely. The trail they left is segmented like a dotted line, becoming a commendation of slowness," the curator continues. Finally there is Francis Alÿs with three videos that are recordings of urban strolls with sound, where the idea of crossing a city is a process of marking a place. Armed with a drumstick, the artist strikes and scrapes across the gates of the Georgian houses on Fitzroy Square in London. By indulging in the rituality of a game often played by children, Alÿs sublimes the interval and the duration by transforming it into rhythm.

until 29.01.2017
The Lasting. L’intervallo e la durata
La Galleria Nazionale

The Lasting

The first exhibition at the renovated Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome opens like a book and plays on a sort of duplicity, where the artworks seem to speak to one another about time.

Latest on Art

Latest on Domus