With the exhibition "Il pane e le rose" (25 March-17 July 2015) the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation reflects on the theme of EXPO 2015, highlighting the human need to nourish not only the body but also the spirit.
The expression "Bread and roses”, coined by Marx, taken up by the American suffragettes and adopted by the workers' movement since 1912, masterfully summarizes the need to associate bread with the profound need to feed on emotional ties and projects, roses with the need to cultivate passions, to acquire knowledge of establishing social relationships.
The image that the curator Marco Meneguzzo wanted to give to the exhibition is that of art as a metaphor of the problem, rather than as a "document" of the existing. For this reason, five artists were chosen, different from each other in terms of genre, generation and poetics, whose common thread was however the ability to elaborate a theme, a condition, through fantastic metaphors that move away from the immediate relationship with the problem, but return to it subtly and in a more universal and lasting way under the powerful thrust of the allegory.
Gianni Caravaggio, Loris Cecchini, Chiara Dynys, Pino Deodato and Giuseppina Giordano have interpreted the theme of "feeding the planet" according to highly personal and non-occasional visions. In almost all cases, these are works created in recent years, before the theme became the slogan of Expo, or, for some of the artists, it is a question of their own specific field of research and action. The result is therefore an exhibition that underlines how the artists are intuitive and premonitory with respect to the great themes of the human and of humanity, even when their work appears interior, spiritual or even metaphysical.
Accompanying the exhibition is the fifth issue of the "Quaderni", in a bilingual edition, Italian and English, which contains the critical essay by Marco Meneguzzo, illustrates the works installed in the exhibition space and gives an account of the research and activity of each artist.
