On Saturday 1 March at 6.30 pm at the Sangallo Fine Art gallery, in Vasto, the exhibition entitled <<Testuale>> will be inaugurated, curated by Lorenzo Madaro with works by Alighiero Boetti, Mario Ceroli, Emilio Isgrò, Salvo and Ben Vautier. The exhibition intends to investigate some specific lines of verbo-visual and verbo-concrete experimentation in the Italian and international context of the 1970s, citing the 1979 exhibition of the same name held at the Rotonda in via Besana in Milan. The five protagonist artists are very distant from each other in terms of experiences and attitudes but all close because, each in total autonomy, they have worked on the intrinsic strength of words and their absence in different fields, from everyday life to that of communication in a more open sense.
From the alphabets of Alighiero Boetti, small tapestries conceived in Afghanistan in the orbit of a pioneering multiculturalism, with phrases and plays on words to another noble father of the history of contemporary art, Mario Ceroli, with historical and recent works capable of making us understand not only the absolute coherence of his discourse as an experimenter of forms and materials, but also the importance of the word in his visual lexicon, outside of any current, because Ceroli was and is an absolutely autonomous researcher. The exhibition continues with Emilio Isgrò, another essential cardinal point: having invented and courageously supported erasure as a primary and conceptual form of research, made him a consolidated master precisely because he brought a further revolution to verbo-visual discourse. Salvo’s tombstones are assertive and ironic, with narrative declinations too, even more sophisticated if we think of the entire pictorial discourse that the artist, after that phase, intended to practice.
The exhibition then concludes with a group of works of unsettling and poetic irony by Ben Vautier, who questions those who observe (and read) his works with respect to the great themes that belong to art as to life. «Textual» is accompanied by a catalog published by Manfredi Edizioni with a critical text by Lorenzo Madaro, curator and tenured professor of Contemporary Art History at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera Milan.
Place: Sangallo Fine Art / viale D’Annunzio, 46/B – Vasto
Vernissage: sabato 1.3 ore 18.30
Duration: dal 1.3 al 19.4.2025
Infos and contact: info@sangallofineart.it / T. 338 56 77 066
Official site: https://www.sangallofineart.it
Social: @sangallofineart