Seeing the birth, in these dark times, of a new place for culture and art is news that, on its own, brings some light. And if the place was born with a non self-celebratory intent (sometimes it happens) but sincerely didactic, it is doubly so.
We are talking about the Biscozzi | Rimbaud Foundation, a “center of the arts” inaugurated in recent days in Lecce after numerous postponements due to the pandemic, which not only shares with the community a selection of works from the art collection formed over 40 years by the couple of collectors (Luigi Biscozzi, famous tax consultant who died in 2018, and Dominique Rimbaud, wife and partner in the collecting adventure), but offers a library specialized in the visual arts of our time, two study rooms, spaces for teaching and rooms for exhibitions temporary (for which the artistic director of the Foundation and curator of the collection, Paolo Bolpagni, has already initiated international contacts) and, at the top, a large terrace, designed – explain Fabrizio and Marco Arrigoni, designers of the respectful architectural recovery of the building – to welcome “non-ordinary events”.
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The works on display are about seventy, of different caliber but all exemplifying the period between the 1950s and 1980s: “not all the artistic languages of that period are present, however – specifies Dominique Rimbaud, president of the Foundation, who carries on the project conceived with her husband – but a section of what was called abstract art. At a certain point we realized that certain works we had purchased did not “speak” to us and we sold, for example, works by the Transavantgarde, a movement that was very important at the time but which did not provide us with that heart stroke that we sought in our works. Not even Arte Povera was among our passions, although there is a work by Zorio in the collection. As our objectives became clearer, we limited the field to certain areas and certain authors ».
In the 12 rooms and rooms of the itinerary, on the first floor of a building that was part of an ancient monastery demolished in the past, works by Enrico Prampolini, Josef Albers, Alberto Magnelli, Luigi Veronesi, Fausto Melotti, Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Renato parade Birolli, Tancredi Parmeggiani, Emilio Scanavino, Pietro Consagra, Kengiro Azuma, Dadamaino, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Mario Schifano, Angelo Savelli (the Calabrian artist born in 1911 and died in 1995, lived between Italy, Paris and New York , to whom the first temporary exhibition is dedicated) and other lesser-known authors today, but responding to the taste and project of collectors. A project, Bolpagni writes, which was guided by a deliberately personal gaze (at the beginning, even “by the intrusion of chance”, Luigi Biscozzi minimized, recalling that his first purchases were two lithographs by Renzo Vespignani and Ugo Attardi, artists unknown to him at the time, purchased in 1969 by a door-to-door book seller) but that when, in the couple, the idea of sharing the collection with the public took shape, he turned to the targeted acquisition of works that they were a kind of hyphen between today’s art and the one that preceded it. Thus, in the last months of Luigi Biscozzi’s life, a 1931 painting by Filippo de Pisis (“meditation – writes the curator – on the legacy of French impressionism and expressionism”) entered the collection, and a small terracotta by 1946 by Arturo Martini “with primitive essentiality, [fino] on the threshold of abstraction “. And, shortly after his death, two papers by Luigi Veronesi: «in the 1980s my husband was looking for works by Veronesi from 1930-1940 – recalls Dominique Rimbaud -. We also met the artist but he no longer had any. Then, shortly after his death, Paolo Bolpagni telephoned me, telling me that he had discovered two beautiful papers from 1936 and 1942. It seemed that they had been looking for us, and today they are exhibited in Lecce ».
Lecce
The choice of the city is certainly not accidental but it is “the fulfillment of a life cycle”: Luigi Biscozzi (1934-2018) was born in Salice Salentino, but was trained in Lecce, before graduating from Bocconi in Milan and starting here a successful career. The Foundation (entirely financed by the couple) was therefore designed to pay off a “debt of gratitude” towards Salento.