All the languages ​​of today’s art – Leonardo Merlini

After three years and a series of global upheavals that would have been difficult to hypothesize at the close of the 2019 Biennale, the International Art Exhibition is back in Venice, curated for the first time by an Italian woman, Cecilia Alemani.

The milk of dreams, the title of the review, is taken from a book, published in Italy by Adelphi, by the English artist and writer Leonora Carrington. It is a tribute to surrealism and that response to the crises of the twentieth century inspired by the search for radical freedom, but it is also a fluid exhibition, capable of going beyond temporal distinctions to restore a living and present image of the potential of the art of our time .

An exhibition that becomes profoundly contemporary also thanks to the presence of artists from the past and finds a deeper current dimension, rooted in those experiences that have led to today. It is also a Biennale that thinks about the body, social and physical, about its construction and its disintegration. It does so with determination, photographing a global scene in which many of the best experiences come from territories that until now had been considered marginal, at least in the great official narratives: the non-Western world, women and gender non-conformity.

In the Cecilia Alemani Biennale a historical imbalance is overturned, as long as the life of the Venetian institution: the male dominance of the protagonists. So in this 2022 marked by war and pandemic, male artists are about 20 percent of those selected, and this, as the president of the Biennale, Roberto Cicutto, is keen to underline, not for a form of politically correct, but simply because it represents “a photograph of reality”.

In a sense The milk of dreamsdespite its surrealist inspiration, it reveals itself to be a profoundly realistic device, but of a realism that the world of art, and probably our societies with it, had never had the courage to fully accept.

It is in this context that, visiting the Central Pavilion and the Arsenal, one encounters works that have the strength of a revelation, such as the great elephant by Katharina Fritsch, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this Biennale, or the series of masterful and painful paintings by Paula Rego or Sandra Mujinga’s phantom sculptures immersed in an unreal green light and the video-mounted photographs of a decisive artist like Nan Goldin, as elusive as everyday life.

But there is also an important component of Italian artists, starting with Giulia Cenci, a Tuscan artist born in 1988, called to rethink the sky above the longest external corridor of the Arsenale with a series of suspended sculptures that explore the territories between the natural and the synthetic, in a fragmentation of hybrids that open space to a human beyond which is in itself a form of revelation. Also important and in some way born in a similar territory, at least at an imaginary level, are the sculptures of Sara Enrico, born in Biella in 1979, which model parts of possible human bodies around an item of clothing that over time has taken on different social meanings, from work to leisure, such as the T-shaped one-piece suit.

On closer inspection, however, even these apparently relaxed forms generate questions and anxieties that go beyond the simple artistic dimension, as happens in almost the entire exhibition. The sculptures of the 29-year-old Genoese Ambra Castagnetti, which are halfway between BDSM objects and tools for ancient interspecies rituals, are another warning on the need to think about different, fluid and non-hierarchical relationships between the different forms of life.

Similarly, the small paintings by Chiara Enzo, born in Venice in 1989, are another way of dismembering bodies through a painting of details. But the weight of the Italian artists in Alemani’s biennial, which has the ability to soften the interpretative codes and to amaze, is measured above all in the historical perspectives: on display are therefore works by well-known artists such as Carla Accardi, Carol Rama, Dadamaino, Tomaso Binga, Regina Cassolo Bracchi, just to name a few. Looking at them again, these drawings, paintings or sculptures tell us about the strength of paths that have been able to go beyond socio-cultural difficulties and limitations, to do one thing: art.

At the Biennale, however, the word Italy immediately refers to another place: our national pavilion, which for the first time in history hosts only one artist, something that almost always happens in other national participations.

The work of Gian Maria Tosatti, curated by Eugenio Viola and commissioned by Onofrio Cutaia, of the Contemporary Creativity Direction of the Ministry of Culture, is another demonstration of how the strength of certain works cannot be defined except through direct experience. History of the night and fate of comets is a narrative process that reconstructs a collective history in fragments, that of industrial Italy from the rise to the fall, up to the abandonment of the production sites, that dismissal that gave the title to a novel by Ermanno Rea and that has become a sort of permanent psychological condition in the post-work and precarious era.

Viola and Tosatti, faithful to the image of the mirror dear to the Roman artist, brought the machinery that was used to produce the mirrors to the Arsenale, they reassembled the factory, his own idea, but in an unreal and lost silence, outside from the territory of what we call reality. Places and environments that have long been familiar now become melancholy or sinister or, again, surprising.

There are stairways, raised rooms, hardly decipherable passages: each movement inside the exhibition has a different sound, because we have to do it in a silence that removes the clamor of the world, indeed, in that large factory that Tosatti has rebuilt with so many workers’ tables it is the world itself that has fled, we realize, leaving behind only a void.

This vacuum is one of the engines of History of the night and fate of comets, we can feel it physically, as if we were leaning out of a ravine and looking down. More with melancholy than fear, probably, with the feeling of the loss of something that, however, we find it hard to remember.

The emptiness and the mirror, the loss and the constant need to find a form of recognition: Viola and Tosatti’s project obviously works largely in the eye of its visitor, but it is in any case an artistic device capable of resonating. As if all the steps we take as we cross the various rooms that have occupied the entire surface of the Tese delle Vergini have the sole purpose of taking us to one of the most intense places in the entire Biennale: a pier that opens into the darkness above a rough sea, inside the pavilion. A howling sea, which perhaps has already submerged traces of our civilization, but which above all really becomes a sea, despite the walls that, we know and see them, continue to surround it.

It is there, on that impossible yet so present pier, that the narrative pact between us and the work reaches the limit and it is there that the enormous ambition of the project manifests itself in all its beauty. Probably the pier will also be the place where visitors decide what they saw in the mirror that the artist wanted to put in front of them. But not before realizing that, with a reference to Pasolini, a constant in the work of Gian Maria Tosatti, over the black waves, down there fireflies are flying.

Ephemeral and very fragile, yet decisive. Symbol also of a reasoning on the environment, on sustainability, on the renewal of an understanding between us and the planet, these fireflies are in their own way the echo of a happiness that seemed lost. But above all they are the measure of a hope with which the great work ends, a “sign of a possible peace” that will take us out of the night of the economic crisis and beyond the fate of comets, messengers of a war between us and nature.