The exhibition, curated by Simona Bartolena, produced and created by ViDi – Visit Different, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lecco and the Lecco Urban Museum System, analyses, through 90 works, how the iconographic theme of the landscape has been interpreted by great Italian masters, such as Massimo d'Azeglio, il Piccio, Telemaco Signorini, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Gaetano Previati, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Ennio Morlotti, Lucio Fontana and other.
The exhibition intertwines with the heritage of the Lecco Urban Museum System: if on the one hand, the rooms of Palazzo delle Paure house some works owned by the museums of Lecco on the other, the itinerary finds a natural continuation inside the Gallery of Modern Art of Villa Manzoni.
“An important appointment - declares Simone Piazza, councilor for culture of the Municipality of Lecco – which closes the calendar of major exhibitions with a review that involves not only two exhibition venues in our city, such as Palazzo delle Paure and Villa Manzoni, but also important works that deal with the iconographic theme of the landscape by authors between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An exhibition promoted by ViDi, in collaboration with the municipal administration, as part of the major project to relaunch the Palazzo delle Paure exhibition center to increase the quality of its exhibitions and the number of visitors".
The subject of the landscape has been investigated several times, even with large exhibitions and publications, referring above all to the French scene, in which - from Romanticism to Barbizon, from the Impressionists to Pointillist, up to the Avant-gardes - the genesis of the Landscape in painting traces a linear path.
Less known, however, is the situation of this theme in Italy, where it was also widely disseminated and where it was equally the protagonist of the rapid evolution that led art towards the contemporary.
Spatial Environment (1948) Lucio Fontana 
Landscape (1921) Carlo Carrà
Possible landscapes covers a time span that goes from the romantic era to the post-war period, and highlights the different approaches to landscape – as a mimesis of reality, as a place of imagination and dreams, as a symbol, as a projection of the self, as a spatial concept -, revealing the progressive tendency to abstraction that led him to the threshold of the Informal and beyond.
It is a story that unfolds from the classicism of historical paysage of the romantics to the investigation of the truth of the Macchiaioli, to reach the pointillist visions and experiments of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, up to the threshold of the contemporary, when, with artists such as Morlotti and Fontana, the landscape translates into emotional instinct or spatial concept . “Although the landscape is a very widespread iconographic theme in the visual arts today – says Simona Bartolena – its autonomy as an autonomous pictorial genre is very recent. In fact, it was only in the XNUMXth century that he was recognized as having an autonomous role: not anymore historical paysage, no longer scenography for mythological, religious or historical tales, but a theme in itself, a moment of observation of truth from truth, an opportunity for technical experimentation and poetic expression. From the sublime nature of the romantic generation to the glimpses from life of the Barbizon painters and their numerous heirs, the nineteenth century is, throughout Europe, the century in which the Landscape finds itself, progressively transforming itself from a scenography for historical or literary biblical narrations, in place of the truth, in place of the soul, from collective space to mental space”
