The Alik Cavaliere (1926-1998) art centre is based in what was the artist’s studio for more than 30 years, from 1964 until his death, set beside an enclosed space – a “small, neat courtyard with large cobblestones where people live their lives, as is the custom in Milan.” (Aldo Rossi). The courtyard is, indeed, where Cavaliere loved to work on his sculptures in the hot months, while also tending to his fruit trees and vegetable garden. He tapped into the living sculpture of nature for the wax moulds for the core, sometimes symbolic or mythological, elements of his bronze and metal works: cardoons, leaves, branches of apricot, apple, fig trees..., sometimes combined with alienated human figures clearly inspired by Surrealism.
Not surprisingly then, Arturo Schwarz was one of the first to take an interest in Cavaliere’s work, initially as a gallery owner and then as an art historian and critic. Who can forget Guido Ballo and Ugo Mulas’ splendid book, published by the Schwarz gallery in 1967? In it, Ballo, Cavaliere’s colleague at the Accademia di Brera, wrote that his work had the air of an enchanted, dead city with metaphysical clarity hanging over it. He also said that Alik always pursued the effect of a psychological web in which the shrubs, brambles and dry branches had no separate values but were the mental moments of a web that was the true theme behind the images.
It is precisely this web that Francesca Molteni and Margherita Palli (a former Cavaliere student) wanted to accentuate, mixing with it the Lewis Carroll of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Gilles Deleuze described these as books for children, preferably girls, because filled with unusual, esoteric words, schemes, codes and deciphering, drawings and photographs, profoundly psychoanalytical content and an exemplary logic and linguistic formalism.
Alik in Wonderland
Centro Artistico Alik Cavaliere
via Edmondo de Amicis, 17, Milano
From 9 to 14 April
5 pm-10 pm
From 15 to 19 April
4 pm-8 pm