Frittelli arte contemporanea presents FUORI TUTTO [Everything out], a new exhibition by artist, poet, novelist Nanni Balestrini.

After Tristanoil, the longest movie in the world presented in 2012, the artist comes back in the Florentine gallery with an original project entitled FUORI TUTTO [Everything out] and his most recent works: I Maestri del Colore [Masters of Color] and Neri [Blacks].

FUORI TUTTO [Everything out] suggests a way out, a projection, a dissemination of creativity: it's an artwork “in progress”, a nucleus of canvas created by the artist with the active participation of the audience, invited to re-elaborate them in terms of relationship and co-authority.

The exhibition will also display two distinct cycles of works, I maestri del colore [The Masters of Color], homage-dialogue with the icons of art history reproduced in the famous series of Fratelli Fabbri Editori, and Neri, a new reflection on the concept of “destruction” in which black spots invade the space built from words. These cycles are related to each other as possible and complementary facets of a work that aims to intervene in the complex universe of the “visible”, understood as the place of our total encounter with the world, through its potentially infinite configurations of concrete existence.

I maestri del colore [The Masters of Color] takes up reproductions of famous paintings in a new key: great icons of the history of art painted by Paolo Uccello, Fernand Léger, Paolo Veronese, Eugène Delacroix, El Greco and Pieter Paul Rubens, on which the artist inserts fragments of text, freely extrapolated from his contemporary typographic media, almost as if to “measure” the language on the image, and vice versa. An extraordinary cycle, in which the “history” of images is confronted in real time, in a happy and active interference, with the “vicissitude” of the word as a mirror of social and political and, in an even broader sense, human becoming.

The work has as its prototype a series of collages from the 1960s based on images taken from the widespread art-historical collection I maestri del colore [The Masters of Color], published at the time by Fratelli Fabbri, which Balestrini has now chosen to transpose onto canvas at the size of the original paintings, thus giving life to a large gallery, both virtual and physical at the same time, emblematic of his intermedial practice, constantly resolved in a concrete sense, and driven by the “need to dominate the visible” (an expression we find precisely in one of the poetic texts dedicated by the author to this cycle of works).

Here, to “dominate the visible” as a place of possibility of being of (and in) the world through creativity as a practice of freedom, it is the printed language, which filters the image, the tangible projection of an ideal place (or rather, its visual-communicative transposition through reproduction: the imagined museum), mediated by the modifying intervention of the artist.

The second cycle of his recent production is the Neri [Blacks]. These are works in which Balestrini visually reformulates one of the cardinal concepts of his artistic poetics, at all levels: that of “destruction”. Again using the technique of collage, these works take and recombine deconstructed fragments of the present media communication, according to intertwined and intermittent trajectories. However, these "verbal landscapes" are partly obliterated and “dominated” by the presence of large, intentionally free and incisive black spots, which the artist superimposes on them, to further problematize their semantic value: to take up one of the phrases that can be read there, one could say that they tend towards the “reproduction of the possible”. The Neri [Blacks] are accompanied by a sound setting, also conceived by Balestrini for the occasion, in which several voices pronounce disconnected fragments of words, in a sort of auditory “impasto”, to amplify in a total and immersive sense the idea of meaningful destruction underlying the paintings themselves. What emerges is a complex emotive-linguistic territory, governed by a subtly dynamic and magmatically evocative expressive balance that, unlike I maestri del colore [The Masters of Color], is no longer based on the interfering recognizability of the various elements (the letter and the image, but also the explicit cut-up technique that materially induces their creative relationship), as much as on their intentional thickening and fragmentation of a new concrete syntax, aimed at the same time at intuiting and translating the communicative collapse that characterizes our hypermedia age, into new possible “places” of relationship.