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“In pure blue”. The brushstroke that Giacomo Leopardi gives to the sky of Naples in “La Ginestra” is the title of the new contemporary art exhibition at Casa Leopardi, curated by Antonello Tolve. The second appointment of the InterValli project opens on 19 October and runs until 7 January 2024 in the rooms of the palace library, the heart of the training of the “fabulous young person” in Recanati. After last year’s experience, when the artists were inspired by “L’Infinity”, today twenty-one masters start from the verses of “La Ginestra” to enter, not on tiptoe but with the powerful presence of art, in the place of Giacomo Leopardi’s mad and desperate studies.
The resilience of the desert flower
Taking inspiration from a timeless poem – composed in Torre del Greco in 1936 – artists born at every latitude, between 1920 and 1980, propose their interpretation of the broom, a “desert flower” which, as the leopardist writes Fabiana Cacciapuoti, «is slow, that is, soft; not reluctant, because it does not oppose the natural rhythm and does not resist, accepting its end despite its innocence, without pride and without vanity, but without cowardice”. Also happy with the desert that fate has destined for her, she embraces what is around her, spreading a “very sweet” scent that that desert “consoles”. And she knows how to make sense of nonsense.
Olimpia Leopardi
Countess Olimpia Leopardi, creator of the exhibition, believes in the ethical and political function of art, which can communicate to break the isolation of the desert, which once again opens the doors of her palace, to build a bridge between a past that Giacomo it makes the present current. «After last year’s public success and critical appreciation, we are ready to reopen the Library to a new selection of artists who wanted to interpret a passionate verse by Ginestra with the help of different expressive means – states Olimpia Leopardi, descendant of the poet – what distinguishes artists is their perception of reality and the extraordinary ability to express it, giving life to suggestions that shake the viewer, stimulate questions or simply challenge us to explore our present from an unusual perspective. With this spirit we worked on the second edition of InterValli to invite the viewer to participate in a journey between past and present, an expression of continuity in a Library which, since its foundation, does not exclusively constitute a rich container of ancient treasures but is also protagonist and driving force of knowledge. With this edition of InterValli, we begin an important journey that will lead us to discover how contemporary artists relate to the work of Giacomo Leopardi.
Some works exhibited in the library of Palazzo Leopardi
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The gaze of the artists
For Antonello Tolve, curator of the exhibition, the artists do their job and wipe out every imposed truth «the second appointment of InterValli with which Casa Leopardi proposes an itinerary into the contemporary in the prestigious spaces of its library, focuses attention out of twenty-one names of art who see in Leopardi’s “smelling broom”, happy with the deserts, a clear indication of resistance to the bad weather of time: to all that freeze-dried news, to all those factoids and pseudo-events, to all those canned speeches that have been polluting the world for a long time. In purissimo azzurro is, in fact, not only the project title but also and above all the clarity and sharpness of vision with which the artists scan the world, often armed with irony and varied linguistic stratagems, to sabotage every cliché and every established power”. And the first to exercise critical thinking, to banish hypocrisy, was the poet from Recanati, who sang of the strength of a flower born among the ruins, among the lava of the volcano that destroys, to spread its perfume, on the backdrop of a blue sky, even when it gives in to night.
The artists and the works
On display in the ancient rooms of the Library are the works of:
Enrico Pulsoni (Avezzano, 1956), Paolo Canevari (Rome, 1963), minusLog (artistic duo active since 2012, composed of Manuela Cappucci and Giustino Di Gregorio), Giulia Napoleone (breaking latest news, 1936), Carla Iacono (Genoa, 1960), Sabine Delafon (Grenoble, 1976), Giuseppe Stampone (Cluses, 1974), Lamberto Pignotti (Florence, 1926), Ulrich Egger (St. Valentin auf der Haide, 1959), Julia Krahn (Jülich, 1978), Giuseppe Ciracì (Brindisi, 1975) and Giusy Calia (Nuoro,1971), Miho Tanaka (Yamanashi,1998), Vettor Pisani (Rome,1940), Deborah Napolitano (Caserta,1973), Mrdjan Bajic (Belgrade,1957), Sebastian Contreras (Buenos Aires,1972 ), Fabrizio Cotognini (Macerata,1983) and Matthias Kostner (Bolzano, 1982), Naoya Takahara (Ehime,1954), Ciro Vitale (Scafati,1975).