Catalogo di mostra
Giacometti – Fontana. La ricerca dell’assoluto
Autore: Chiara Gatti, Sergio Risaliti e altri
Editore: Silvana Editoriale
Lingue di traduzione: italiano-inglese
Traduttori: Elizabeth Burke, Jeremy Carden, Cristina Popple
Abbiamo realizzato la traduzione italiano-inglese dei testi critici per la mostra Giacometti – Fontana. La ricerca dell’assoluto, a cura di Chiara Gatti e Sergio Risaliti (Palazzo Vecchio e Museo Novecento di Firenze, 2 marzo – 4 giugno 2023).
Alberto Giacometti e Lucio Fontana per la prima volta insieme. Un progetto museale inedito presenta l’incontro ideale e il dialogo potente fra due giganti del Novecento, grazie al confronto straordinario fra capolavori in arrivo dall’Italia e dall’estero.
Firenze ospita un doppio appuntamento ideato da Sergio Risaliti, direttore del Museo Novecento, che affonda nella ricerca inesausta e ostinata dei due maestri, protagonisti di un viaggio parallelo che intende suggerire nuove strade di analisi e sondare nuove interpretazioni.
La recherche de l’absolu
by Marco Fagioli
In what is a key text on modern sculpture, the first Letter to Pierre Matisse (1948), Alberto Giacometti rendered in the form of an autobiographical account the essential features of the language of sculpture. It is worth quoting some passages from the letter in full, because its theoretical and cultural implications represent advanced points in the inquiry into the nature of art as language, an inquiry that started with Cézanne and ran through the whole of the twentieth century and even up to the present day, when, for reasons of opportunity and the ideological hegemony of the power elite that manages the art market, such inquiry has been completely suffocated.
In his letter Giacometti nailed down all the points of the matter: the relationship between representation (mimesis) and form, central to Western artistic culture; the relation between totality and detail; the conception of space and that of structure; the transparency of volumes; the relationship between space and movement; the non-tie between isolated object (form) and space; the idea of the circularity of time (the simultaneity of Henri Bergson); and, finally, the difficulty of defining the concept of portrait and that of figure, the relation between reality and memory. Paradoxically, all the issues of the conceptual elaboration of art understood as language seem to have been channelled into the letter, which is the story of Giacometti’s sculpture.
