An exhibition dedicated to childhood, to play in its structuring in rules but also in their transgression, is being held at Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto. Childhood as a golden age of freedom and lightness but also of pain, of darkness, of cruelty.
This is the reading slant of this theme in the chords of curator Saverio Verini, drawing inspiration from his essay La stagione fatata (Castelvecchi nel 2021). With a work of association between works, artists and spaces, Saverio Verini builds a real story, complete with prologue and epilogue. Each room is a chapter, and from the titles it is immediately clear that the world of childhood is entered in all its aspects, not only those associated with lightness.
The exhibition opens with two works by Vedovamazzei (from the series “Early Works. Scipione Borghese,” 2021), a duo that has always been interested in the childhood dimension, in the practice of an inversion of gazes and formats that start from replicas of past masters at the hands of children.
“The works presented within the first room, constitute a ‘manifesto’ that allows the visitor to immediately get in touch with some of the key themes of the exhibition: the relationship between childhood and art history, between adult and child; the wild and untamable character of childhood; the alteration of formats and, with them, of meanings and perspectives. All this, mediated by the artist’s gaze.”
So we read in the text that introduces the first room, the first in a series that, in the view of a curator but also of a museum director, is intended to go towards giving access to different audiences.
The epilogue is all encapsulated in Luca Bertolo’s flower, Il Fiore di Anna#2, oil and pastel on large canvas, a scaled-up enlargement of a flower drawn by a child that bears the style of childhood, although it also betrays traces of the artist’s expert hand that of the childlike style. Between Prologue and Epilogue childhood unfolds through its various stages, especially different angles and perspectives expressed in an equally varied use of media and forms of expression, drawing, video, performance and in an organization of intergenerational artist dialogues.
It starts with the rules of the game that “allows for experiencing reality in another way, taking a point of view that feeds the imagination,” especially when the game can reveal aspects of risk, as in the performance staged through a video installation by Calixto Ramírez (Tana libera tutti!, 2016) with three screens synchronized and orchestrated in the space to play with the visitor.
From the childhood golden age where lightness is found in the intergenerational comparison between Adelaide Cioni’s works in India ink and pastel (Yellow Circles, 2021), and in vinyl colors on paper (Sketch for the Sea, 2019) and the painted metal of Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures (Standing Mobile, 1974).
We arrive in the fourth room where that fundamental moment of every child’s growth dominates, namely school, “one of the first outposts of society,” where norm and disobedience, order and chaos, duty and transgression alternate. Riccardo Baruzzi’s abaci (ABACO, 2018), pastels on wood, acrylics on paper and on linen, the first three letters of Tomaso Binga’s alphabets (“Alfabeto Pop” series, 1977) collage on pre-printed cards that encapsulate all the irreverence and performative force of the artist (pseudonym of Bianca Menna), the resistance that Filippo Berta places at the center of his rules where adults are required to lift school desks above their heads as long as their strength allows ((Happens Everyday, 2012). Maurizio Cattelan’s Punishments (2012) encapsulates his typical irreverent touch, though not with his usual cruelty of impact. In thirty sheets of paper taken from an elementary school notebook, the phrase “Wrestling ‘in’ class is dangerous” is transformed, with a red pen correction and again in the school writing style, into “Wrestling ‘in’ class.”
This is followed by unfailing references to the fairy tale. Pinocchio, the protagonist of Carlo Collodi’s novel of the same name, punctuates this oscillation between desire and experience, between nature and artifice, an all-Italian tradition. In Pinocchio, Luigi Ontani transforms himself in one of his photographic works on paper, part of a series of personifications of characters belonging to history, mythology, literature, and religion that have identified his poetics since the late 1960s To Andrea Salvino’s candid and disturbing portrait of Pinocchio responds that of Marta Roberti, a self-portrait made on Oriental paper where the artist appears naked and with a headdress on her head, retaining from Pinocchio’s iconography the elongated nose, the cricket on her shoulders and a skin that looks like wood. Cesare Pietroiusti’s Pinocchio (“Pinocchio” new with rubber, Trieste Zone A, 1954) is that of a postage stamp from his father’s collection that enters the performative gesture that generates the ‘installation, a space and occasion for confrontation between father and son.
The fairy tale space continues in the other room with “ambiguities and shadowy areas; dark, grotesque, bitter and disturbing.” On the large photograph of a peacefully sleeping infant are superimposed three circles painted by the artist, irruption of its tranquility as a shadow projecting into the future and the title: One Day All This Will Be Yours (2019). In the same room, a video and an installation are what remains of Miriam La Plante’s live performance (Lupus in Fabula, 2005-2024), a parody of the world through the fairy tale (and its cruelty and cruelty) with the incredible strength and suspension that the artist manages to create around herself and that even in the video she manages to convey, although it will certainly be a small part compared to those who experienced the performance in person.
A as short as it is powerful animation by Diego Marcon (Ludwig, 2018), where a child in the hold of a boat passing through a storm tries to break the darkness by lighting a match and singing a song, ferries to the eerie toy room, where toys are laden with a dark side, as highlighted by Charles Baudelaire’s Morale of the Toy, a text dear to the curator and repeatedly cited in his book.
Thus this ambiguity returns in the objects related to childhood, such as the bucket, rake, dustpan, watering can, balloon, a duck-saver, and a mat in Elena Bellantoni’s sculptures. We are certain that upon reading the sequence of these objects one instinctively associates with a sense of lightness immediately belied at the sight of the sculptures rendered in large dimensions and made of concrete. Even the title, CeMento (2019), helps anchor them to the ground. Cement is also the artist’s favorite material, a symbol of recent Italian history, its rebirth but also its destruction with building speculation. The heaviness of the objects is counterbalanced by Thomas Braida’s painting, where ambiguity is ‘played out’ between the representation of stuffed animals and other objects (toys and various trinkets), painted in cheerful tones, and the frozen vitality in the taxidermy of the title, Taxidermy in Feast (2011), an explicit relation to biology and its unnatural freezing of life that continues in the “genetically modified” toys that, as if they had come out of the canvas, are arranged on a small shelf.
We arrive in the penultimate room. Francesca Grilli’s performance (Sparks, 2021) documented by video where the rules of the game are reversed and it is the child who leads it confronts Linda Fregni Nagler’s series of five prints on cotton paper (The Hidden Mother, 2013). A series of nineteenth-century photographs collected by the artist over 10 years in flea markets and online auctions, portraits of young or newborn children hint at the presence of the mother behind who tries to hold them in a pose by hiding in the most diverse ways, in the end result even disturbing, a presence that in no child can be disregarded in his or her transition from infancy to later stages.
The exhibition closes with Luca Bertolo’s work (Anna’s Flower #2, 2019) in a circular journey, a journey into childhood but also into the art and poetics of artists and the world of childhood, creativity a precious tool to be kept alive, in its ambivalent state of lightness and heaviness, light and darkness.
The attempt to reconnect with the purity of feeling typical of the childlike dimension seems to be an indispensable prerogative of the figure of the artist: ‘behaving like a child,’ an expression traditionally pronounced with a negative meaning, could prove to be a strategy of resistance to the conventions and constraints of adult life.” So also closes the narrative in the text that accompanies the exhibition, again, with a delicacy that seeks not to undermine the visitor’s entirely personal experience.
Infinita infanzia, a cura di Saverio Verini, Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, fino al 16 giugno, 2024
images: (cover 1) Filippo Berta in «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph: Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist and Prometeogallery by Ida Pisani (2) Vedovamazzei in «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph:Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy Vedovamazzei and Magazzino, Roma (3) Calixto Ramírez in «Infinita Infanzia». Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view.Ph: Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome (4) Adelaide Cioni in «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph. Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist and P420, Bologna (5) Tomaso Binga in «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph: Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist and Erica Ravenna Gallery (6) Marta Roberti in «Infinita Infanzia». Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. (7) Myriam Laplante, in «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph: Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist (9) Diego Marcon, «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph: Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artists and Sadie Cole HQ, London (10) Elena Bellantoni in «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view.Ph. Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist (11) Linda Fregni Nagler, «Infinita Infanzia», Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph. Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artist and Monica De Cardenas Gallery, Milan (12) Luca Bertolo, Infinita Infanzia. Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024, exhibition view. Ph: Giuliano Vaccai. Courtesy the Artists, SpazioA, Pistoia, Italy.
