In the setting up at the Opificio's Arts and Sciences centre, in via Nanni Costa in Bologna, the magnifying glass for looking at the world is the "hand", symbol and limb, a perfect synthesis of the vision of the Foundation created by Marino Golinelli. Indeed, in the complex articulation of the hand, as in that of the Foundation, there is the know-how and the will to do, the need to understand in order to then act, the unique and explosive blend of art and science, as a propellant for traveling in an otherwise difficult future to imagine.
The exhibition literally welcomes the visitor into the hands of Marino Golinelli, closed and open, signifying interiority and knowledge. The philanthropist's hands are reproduced in large dimensions, carved by wood craftsmen and transformed into gigantic origami covered with mirrors, so that the viewer finds himself catapulted into a multifaceted vision of himself and his surroundings. Disorientation is the best state of mind in which to be amazed, by the failures of a genius like Leonardo Da Vinci as well as by the successes of the hands of the latter.
Inside the "closed hands" is Albrecht Dürer's De Symmetria partium in rectis formis humanorum corporum libri, a treatise on the drawing of the human figure whose instructions are interpreted as one of the first algorithms of generative art. The algorithm is used here to transform the dimensions of the hand into frequencies and the ratios between them, thus obtaining sounds. Among the funniest things to do, therefore, is the possibility of placing your hand on a digital screen and listening to your own music, discovering that every being has a unique sound signature, just as its fingerprint is unique.
Among the rare books one can admire Andrea Vesalio's De humani corporis fabrica and Ambroise Paré's Deux Livres de chirurgie. In short, we then pass from a flat world, the page, to a three-dimensional world, finding ourselves in front of the anatomical wax models of the hands of Anna Morandi Manzolini, made in the eighteenth century in Bologna, which were an instrument of knowledge and reproduction of reality , but also a sculptural work of rare beauty.
The third installation, produced by the Golinelli Foundation on the occasion of ArteFiera 2019, is "hand-brain", a sculpture that invites us to observe how we observe, playing first with the deceptions of perception and then with the manipulation of observational data.
But as we have anticipated in this exhibition we travel in space, but also in time.
Therefore, alongside very modern installations, there are a series of paintings created between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, in that "particular historical moment - says Andrea Zanotti - in which there has been a change of pace in some ways similar to the one we are experiencing now ”. Among the works stands out a Madonna and Child attributed to Caravaggio, never revealed to the public before. Giovan Battista Crespi's Judith and Holofernes is impressive; The Christ of the coin by Mattia Preti; the Madonna and Child by Ludovico Carracci and San Giovanni Battista by Guercino (Pinacoteca Capitolina); Portrait of Francesco Arsilli by Sebastiano del Piombo (Pinacoteca "F. Podesti").
“The path – reads a note – therefore leads to an index finger pointing towards Heaven, to recall the destiny of greatness to which man is called and which is all written in the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel”.
The finger was reinterpreted by the contemporary artist Michelangelo Pistoletto in the "mirror painting", which re-proposes Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. The creative touch is our own touch as men, whose destiny is in our hands.
A destiny that evolves in technology. Here we wanted to reconstruct the Battle of Anghiari, a lost work by Leonardo, due to a series of errors. The information found on the net has been re-materialized by the kids who attend the workshops on the Golinelli Foundation exhibition.
Finally, a further level of perception of the exhibition space is offered by another gamification laboratory which has transported the themes of the exhibition into the space of an immersive game in Virtual Reality. The world in which the player operates is the 3D reconstruction of the exhibition set-up where objects, characters, fragments of information appear with which, by interacting, one relives the story of The Battle of Anghiari in the vision of the game's young creators.
The last step in the evolution of the hand leads to a futuristic present, in which the bionic limb is the protagonist, an advanced engineering work created by the young researchers of BionIt Labs srl - one of the start-ups operating in the G-Factor incubator-accelerator – who have designed an innovative and adaptable limb for each patient.
