From 20 June to 26 October 2014, the Regional Archaeological Museum of Aosta hosts the Reverberi Collection, set up over the years by Gian Piero Reverberi, a well-known musician, arranger and producer. Many of the greatest successes of Italian songwriters are linked to him, and not only, such as Gino Paoli, Luigi Tenco, Fabrizio De Andrè, New Trolls, Le Orme, Lucio Battisti, Ornella Vanoni, Lucio Dalla, Paul Anka, Patty Pravo and Sergio Endrigo. In 1979 he founded the Rondò Veneziano group which reached the pinnacle of success by selling 20 million copies throughout Europe, with its original Baroque-style music. Alongside his professional passion for music, Reverberi has in fact cultivated another overwhelming passion, that for art: both lived as an attentive spectator of his time, with the ability to grasp the novelties emerging on the world scene.
On the initiative of theDepartment of Education and Culture of the Autonomous Region of Valle d'Aosta, this magnificent Collection, until now granted only to the admiration of friends, makes its first public appearance, on the occasion of which Beatrice Buscaroli e Bruno Bandini, who are its curators, have selected around 90 works from the more than 300 collected by the musician over the past 30 years.
La Reverb Collection in fact, it was established over about three decades, favoring a particular season: that of informal painting. A rich catalogue, which on the one hand enhances the centrality of European investigation, and on the other dedicates ample space to that declination of the informal characterized by the dissolution of the "figure" (as witnessed by the CoBrA experience) and by original evolutions of conceptual experiences (as in the cases of Novelli or Bendini). The "Informal Season" of the Reverberi Collection therefore presents works by Fautrier, Afro, Perilli, Santomaso, Marfaing, Appel, Jorn, Dorazio, Olivieri, Bargoni, Bendini, Lindstrom, Shiraga, Manzoni, Schumacher, Nitsch, thanks to which it manages to offer a cross-section of the highest Italian and European level.
The works on display present a precise testimony of post-war art, marked by an awareness of the ephemeral and uncertainty nature of the present: this translates into a frustration of vision, the result of a primacy that is recognized to the expressive gesture, to the dynamics of the sign and matter. Revolution of gesture and poetics of color and matter seem to be the original vehicles to entrust artistic creation, especially through the medium of painting. Psychic automatisms of a surrealist matrix and attention for the variants of the philosophies of existence go to compose that singular and composite artistic and cultural organism which is usually defined Informal.
The ways of the Informal are many, just as many are the awareness that the artists are manifesting. What appears more solid and destined to last over time is an undeniable attention towards the practice of painting, although it can no longer be contained within the confines of a form, within the limits of a composition that seems to constrain the spaces of freedom of creation. In a word, it is a painting for which – as Francis Ponge wrote in 1946 when presenting an exhibition by Jean Fautrier – “'beauty' returns”. But it is a beauty in quotation marks, which can indeed return on condition of upsetting the expressive canons that preceded it. The "narration" is not renounced, rather the image translates into a place where the artist's creative freedom takes shape through a conversion from the unknown and the unspeakable, understood both as a legacy of an increasingly fragmented and dehumanized history, both as a tangle of the unconscious.
