Or did he play with the Caroline Cows, the countless puppets and gadgets that accompanied the products advertised by Carosello, or did his mouth water in front of the La grande binge poster?
Among the numerous exhibitions scheduled during the Expo semester, therefore dedicated to food, the highly original “Paper Food” stands out for its strong originality, produced by the Credito Valtellinese Group Foundation and set up in its prestigious Milanese exhibition spaces in Corso Magenta. Original and unedited because it moves memories, it enters everyday life like a river of curiosity telling food through the representations that have spread thanks to advertisements, labels, stickers, gadgets, menus, magazines, books, but also transport documents, announcements, letterheads or boxes and cinema posters.
A long search that has allowed the selection of over 500 pieces, partly unpublished and never seen before, which will be exhibited in the former refectory of the Stelline for one hundred days, from the 10 June to the 20 September, to tell the stories of food and customs in Italy from the fifteenth century to today, offering a real national iconographic atlas of the history of food, still missing. But also a parallel history of illustration, which ranges from authors to be rediscovered to famous signatures such as those of Marcello Dudovich, Leonetto Cappiello, Antonio Rubino, Achille Beltrame, Golia, Gino Boccasile, Leo Longanesi, Benito Jacovitti, Walter Molino, Tanino Liberatore …
To make this exhibition truly unique, Andrea Tomasetig, the Milanese antiquarian bookseller who has been its creator and curator from the outset, has brought together the best of four important private collections. Starting from the extraordinary Michele Rapisarda collection, made up of over 12.000 illustrated Italian printed papers for daily use from the seventeenth to the twentieth century (announcements, prize vouchers, payment schedules, wrapping paper, postcards, catalogues, stickers, licences, posters, magazines, etc. ), largely centered on nutrition, which recounts central chapters in the history of food and customs through a rare or little-known iconographic repertoire.
It is accompanied by a selection of books, manuscripts (many unpublished) and curiosities on paper from the important gastronomic library of Giorgio Grillo and Linda Pagnotta, made up of over a thousand works, which authoritatively cover the entire course of Italian gastronomy from the fifteenth century to today , from Platina to the futurists, up to the second half of the twentieth century and contemporary editions, Pulcinoelefante booklets and comics included.
A third section presents some of the incredible advertising materials that followed the airing of Carosello: gadgets, games, books, albums, product packaging, inflatable puppets from the Carlo Tranchina collection.
Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to Italian cinema from the Second World War to 2000: surprising posters, playbills and photo envelopes for the originality of the culinary-cinephile citations. An authentic cornucopia of amusing and unusual images of food parades along the walls of the Gallery, which refer to a real Italy, both popular and bourgeois, from neorealism to the present day. There is everything: auteur cinema and Italian comedy. The whole comes from the Enrico Minisini collection.
With this great exhibition Tomasetig continues, with the important contribution of the GCV Foundation, the cultural project started with a series of small thematic exhibitions on paper food, all with the precious contribution of the authoritative gastronomy historian Alberto Capatti. A project that could have a further and ambitious development: the creation of a Food Museum, which curiously is still missing in Italy, as a desirable cultural legacy of Expo.
"Around the exhibition - underline Cristina Quadrio Curzio and Leo Guerra, artistic directors of the galleries of the Credito Valtellinese Group - various collateral initiatives are planned, from guided tours to educational workshops, from the screening of films on the subject to the scenic reading of author texts , up to conferences and round tables on specific topics.”
PAPER FOOD
Galleria Credito Valtellinese Group
Corso Magenta n. 59 – Milan
11 June – 20 September 2015
