Minimi Avanzi, which presents 24 works of different formats, created by two of the most important and recognized masters of contemporary ceramic sculpture, to which is added a new large-scale installation, created specifically for the museum spaces, which will dialogue with its places rich in history and with the ancient art masterpieces preserved in it.
The exhibition, curated by Stefano Papetti, Elisa Mori, Giorgia Berardinelli and Silvia Bartolini, is the duo's first one-man show in the Marche region, and also has an important cultural and touristic renaissance significance for the whole region.
Originally scheduled for last November 26th, the inauguration had to undergo a postponement due to the terrible seismic events that hit the Marches and in particular the provinces of Ascoli Piceno and Macerata. Four months later, the exhibition is now back with the same exhibition project.
Bertozzi & Casoni. Minimi Avanzi deals with some themes dear to the two artists, first of all, that of food in all its forms - leftovers from banquets, waste, cans, leftovers, rubbish bins -, as well as flowers, butterflies, animals, newspapers, and elements of life which, skilfully dismembered and reassembled, make up the unusual still lifes made of polychrome ceramics that made them famous.
A further connection with the territory is given by the fact that the Marche capital boasts a long and important tradition with that ceramic art that Bertozzi & Casoni have been able to reinterpret within the panorama of contemporary art: polychrome ceramics, in fact, constitute the their privileged medium for guaranteeing a reproduction that more often than not surpasses reality, while the imaginary draws from everyday life, among objects that are recovered just when they become waste, with clear reference to the consumer society.
The result is works constantly poised between compositional surrealism and formal hyperrealism, in which the vanitas and transience of the organic world are connected to those feelings of disgust and horror that project the public into the disposable world and futility of modern materialism; but through ceramics Bertozzi & Casoni give objects a new existence, giving them a sort of new "eternal" life. In fact, removed from perishability, they acquire a new value which is that of aesthetic enjoyment.
The spectator, therefore, faced with the waste of society transformed into amazing sculptures, which it is difficult to fully grasp at first glance, discovers their horror and beauty, and is urged on several occasions, between amazement and , to linger in the observation of the smallest details letting oneself be seduced by works in which past and present, artifice and reality merge.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog printed by Artelito (Camerino), edited by Stefano Papetti, Elisa Mori, Giorgia Berardinelli, Silvia Bartolini, with a text by Marco Senaldi
Bertozzi & Casoni. Minimum Leftovers was born from an idea of the Verticale d'Arte Cultural Association and is promoted and organized by the latter in collaboration with the Civic Museums of Ascoli Piceno, under the patronage of MiBACT - Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, of the Region Marche, the Province of Ascoli Piceno, the Municipality of Ascoli Piceno, the Italian Association of Ceramic Cities, the Marche Culture Foundation, the Marche Social Media Team
BERTOZZI & CASONI. Biographical notes
Bertozzi & Casoni is a company founded in 1980 in Imola by Giampaolo Bertozzi (Borgo Tossignano, Bologna, 1957) and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni (Lugo di Romagna, Ravenna, 1961).
Their first artistic training took place at the Istituto Statale d'Arte per la Ceramica di Faenza in a climate dominated by a "cold" post-informal style then in vogue. Of greater interest to them are the figurative sculptures of Angelo Biancini, with whom Bertozzi collaborates in the study within the school, the decorative art of Gianna Boschi and the conceptual radicalism of Alfonso Leoni.
As soon as they finished their studies, Bertozzi and Casoni attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, founded a company and participated in events that attempted to focus on the protagonists and reasons for a "new ceramics".
Executive skill and detached irony already characterize their first creations in thin polychrome majolica. The collaboration (1985-1990) with the Ceramic Cooperative of Imola is important, where they work as researchers in the Experimentation and Research Center on Ceramics. In 1987 and 1988 they collaborated with "K International Ceramics Magazine" for which they also created the cover images. In the XNUMXs executive virtuosity reached new heights between sculptural works, intersections with design and creations of works by established Italian and European artists: Arman and Alessandro Mendini, among others. In 1990 they created fountains and large sculptures for an urban intervention in Tama, a new district of Tokyo. From 1993 is the large panel Say it with flowers placed on an external wall of the Civil Hospital of Imola. In the XNUMXs a more conceptual and radical aspect emerged in their work: ceramics took on ever-increasing dimensions until it bordered on linguistic and constructive hyperbole. The critics and the most important national and international art galleries are interested in their work. Their sculptures – symbolic, mocking and pervaded by a sense of attraction towards what is fleeting, transitory, perishable and in decay – have become internationally recognized icons of a not only contemporary human condition. The corrosive irony of their works is always counterbalanced by an indestructible executive perfectionism. Between compositional surrealism and formal hyperrealism, Bertozzi and Casoni investigate the refuse of contemporary society, not excluding the cultural ones: from those of the past to those of the closest artistic trends. Icons such as the Brillo box examined by Pop Art or the cans of Artist's shit by Piero Manzoni find, in a refined ceramic version that investigates their obsolescence and degradation, both the signs of an irreparably past time and a freezing in arrangements which, conversely, entrust them to truly immortal destinies. Since 2000, Bertozzi and Casoni have abandoned the use of majolica to favor, in a sort of epic of trash, a wider range of techniques and ceramic materials of industrial origin, varying their processes and compositions. The physical presence of the objects and figures represented attracts for its conceptual complexity and elliptical references, the suggestion increases with the discovery of the material used and the perfect mimesis achieved and, finally, the formal implications emerge, even pictorial, of overbearingly figurative but basically conceptual and abstract. A contemporary version of the vanitas theme that has seen great masters of the past compress into the space of a canvas dazzling flowers, fruit, foods and symbolic animals. Allusions to an impermanence (memento mori) that Bertozzi and Casoni, masters of doubt and of the "perhaps" overturn in a search for beauty; a beauty that can be found even in the most neglected and battered object.
CIVIC ART GALLERY OF ASCOLI
Among the precious works preserved, the 1288th century Cope of English manufacture stands out in terms of importance, donated in 1527 to the Cathedral of Ascoli by Pope Nicholas IV, the paintings by Carlo Crivelli (the two triptychs of Valle Castellana 1575th century), Cola dell' Amatrice (The ascent to Calvary, 1901), Titian (San Francesco receives the stigmata, XNUMXth century), Guido Reni (Annunciation, XNUMX), Strozzi, De Ferrari, Magnasco, Mancini, Morelli, Palizzi and Pellizza da Volpedo (Amorous walk , XNUMX). The works are set in splendid rooms, furnished with rare consoles, armchairs, mirrors and chests of drawers from the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries which, with the precious curtains and Murano chandeliers, recreate the atmosphere and charm of an aristocratic palace.
