The shows that the Hendrik Andersen Museum (Via Pasquale Stanislao Mancini 20 in Flaminian district a Roma) dedicates to Joseph Modica it is a tribute to his long and prolific career but, at the same time, a tribute to Hendrik Christian Andersen in the museum house where almost all of his most important works are collected. The exhibition itinerary focuses on the theme of the atelier, one of the most studied subjects by the Sicilian painter, recurring in his production as can be seen from the titles in which the word "atelier" is a real leitmotiv. For Hendrik Andersen the atelier was his life. The permanent collection is housed in the two rooms of the museum on the ground floor, exhibited precisely in what were in fact atelier and gallery or the places where Hendrik worked sculpting his monumental sculptures and where he exhibited the sculptures for friends, collectors and enthusiasts once fused in bronze and intended, for the most part, to decorate the squares and buildings of his ideal city which, alas, remained unrealised”. This is how the curator Maria Giuseppina Di Monte introduces the exhibition in her text in the catalogue.
It is in this museum context that Giuseppe Modica's exhibition on the theme of the Atelier fits in, a subject strongly present in the artist's research since 1990. Gabriele Simongini, co-curator of the exhibition, takes the viewer on a journey inside the work of Modica: "among mirages, reflections, refractions, backlit results, reflections, we let ourselves go getting lost in these labyrinths of the Mediterranean vision, knowing that we admire an illusion that takes us elsewhere, perhaps a utopia of the gaze capable of communicating effectively with that utopian and ideal inspiration which, albeit in different ways, spreads everywhere in the Andersen Museum. The proximity of visible reality is transfigured in the distance of the metaphysical aura. The painting becomes a device of visual and reflective/speculative multiplication”.
Il exhibition itinerary opens on an emblematic work of Modica, a tribute to Saint Jerome in Antonello da Messina's studio with the work Omaggio ad Antonello (St. Jerome in the study) of 1990-91. Here the artist portrays himself seated while he paints, and the studio, a sunny space adhering to the extraordinary compositional register of Antonello's work, is transformed into the artist's atelier, as if to consecrate the value of painting.
“Throughout the years, the theme of the Atelier reappears with precise variations and changes. Several times in my written notes I have focused on the studio-atelier understood as a labor-oratorium: it is in the Atelier that ideas are reorganized and clarified; it is in this magical place that the alchemical conversion of thoughts, fragments of memory and annotations (sketches, color tests, collages, photos) take place, which are organized and take shape”. This is how Giuseppe Modica begins the story of his new exhibition and of the great intimate and symbolic value of the theme covered by it.
The Atelier is a private space that belongs only to the Artist, it is a world made up of illusory places and of thought that here becomes a privileged subject, like it can be seen in the 37 works that make up the entire exhibition itinerary.
The painter's eye detects and reveals things, giving them a previously unknown appearance and identity: the artist renames the world and shows it through his own style and language in a singular and magical light and configuration. The Atelier is the place of a labyrinthine interweaving of everyday impressions and cultural memories that take shape in object-characters: the camera, the mirror, the square, Dürer's cube and the enigmatic presences of Man Ray. On the topical front, the Modica exhibition presents some works dedicated to the drama of migrants in the Mediterranean and to the condition of solitude caused by the current pandemic. The atelier becomes a solitary canvas immersed in the intense light of the artist's studio where the viewer's gaze lights up on the geography of pain or is transformed into an almost dark space with a minimal vision of the world.
