MIART 2024
For the 28th edition of MIART, Frittelli arte contemporanea returns to exhibit in the Established section (HALL 3, BOOTH A112 - 114), presenting a project curated by Roberto Lacarbonara entitled Signage. Letters, codes and signs of an artificial landscape.
The genesis of an artificial world, at the end of the 1950s, nourishes the imagination of an entire generation of European and American artists, fostering a linguistic transformation that, emerging from informal and realist instances, focuses on the analysis of the new urban and media landscape.
The cinema and the newborn television redefine the entire metropolitan landscape of post-modern Italy, showing a chaotic, contaminated and disordered territory: road signs, building abuses, artificial light signs, are clues to an uncertain "terrain vague", no longer rural, not yet urban.
In an article in Il Mondo in 1965, Geno Pampaloni warns that the strips of "American landscape" around the motorway are destined to produce profound alterations in the relationship between Italians and their territory. From Risi to Pasolini, from Visconti to Fellini, from Antonioni to Olmi, a hybrid territory that mixes buildings under construction with unfinished houses already in ruins, muddy dirt tracks and roaring construction sites emerges; the construction corresponds to the collapse, the ruins, the aqueducts that will nourish, decades later, Sorrentino's "great beauty".
Many artists initiate practices of picking up and incorporating the codes of urban modernity. The capital's galleries are filled with those "metropolitan portions" cut out and displayed on walls. "A world made by slogans", Germano Celant notes, "by visual cuttings, a sampling of the mass media, of the quick flashes of TV, of the zoned fragments of poster art".
The protagonists are the urbanised landscape glimpsed through a car window, so full of Coca Cola signs or ESSO stations, but also dismembered and stamped letters that define a language and an already mature and conscious acquisition. Maurizio Calvesi even speaks of "signage art: the painting provokes our attention in the same way, and to the same extent, as a sign".
Artists on show: Pino Pascali, Mimmo Rotella and Gianni Bertini, together with Tomaso Binga, Lucia Marcucci, Luciano Ori and Lamberto Pignotti.