Cats posing as sphinxes, historiated steles, monuments against the ephemeral, disquieting obelisks and, above all, the bronze reinterpretations of the Greek-Latin myth. At the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation the contemporary is on stage with the refined and cultured exhibition dedicated to the Franco-Czech artist Ivan Theimer. The exhibition curated by Marco Meneguzzo highlights the expressive characteristics of the artist, so strongly marked by a “mystery” symbology almost like an initiate.
“We dig into the past, we dig into the memory, we dig into the subsoil – of the earth, but also of being -, and what we find is a“ synthetic memory ”of time. This memory can only be represented through the symbol, which is much, much more than a metaphor, because if this is a shift from one image to another, the symbol is a treasure chest made of multiple relationships between meanings, variables simultaneously in time and space ”explains the curator.
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Bronze orphisms
Bronze orphisms condense in flashing moments of calls, echoes, implications; with the myth always lurking that becomes a vector of upheavals and psychological interpretations. And although everything is ephemeral, the bronze of the monuments remains, it is made to last over time. “His life and his work are the meeting of two aspects: one, minority, of representation of reality and one, preponderant, of allegory, metaphor, myth, symbol. And a symbol dear to Theimer is precisely that of myth ”.
Obelisks, steles, turtles and children, typical of his sculptural production, contribute to giving body and meaning to the title of the exhibition – “Symbolic forest” – in which the critical emphasis is placed on the symbolic aspect of his work, but also on his vertical plastic development – the “forest” in fact, with its repeated typologies – which reverberates in the courtyard and in the furnished rooms of the Museum.
Path
In the courtyard of the Accorsi-Ometto Museum a series of obelisks frames a group of children playing. On them triumphs the sculpture of Arione, a unicum in the artist’s production. The gallery of the Museum, on the other hand, is dedicated to some paintings characterizing the artist’s first production, the so-called “trous”, holes, and to a series of drawings on paper. After the Sala Tartaruga dedicated to Hercules and his myth, the Chinese Hall sees the scenographic representation of the “symbolic forest” with the works concentrated in the center and soaring almost to touch the ceiling, creating a sort of forest of obelisks. A cat surmounting a herm finds its “real” correspondent in an earthenware cat. The setting up of this environment thus aims to create an ethereal but engaging space that allows the viewer to be isolated from the museum space. The adjoining room is occupied by other two-dimensional works by the artist such as the d’après by great painters of the past and the sketch of the monument for the bicentenary of the Declaration of Human Rights, erected in Champ de Mars in Paris, in 1989.