The review is part of the project “Contemporary Sicily” conceived by the GAM Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Palermo in collaboration with the Ars Mediterranea association in order to offer a glimpse into the languages of contemporaneity.
The exhibition offers an excursus on their most recent production, through a nucleus of works, some of which are unpublished, which characterize their most authentic expressive figure, in which irony hides a profound reflection on the most burning issues of contemporary society, and where reality and fiction, wonder and ordinariness coexist.
Among these, we note I don't remember (2015), in which a puppet Pinocchio, melancholic and aged, with a human face and an elongated nose, is seated on a pile of books which are nothing but the various and countless editions of the masterpiece by Collodi.
There is no shortage of the typical 'sparecchiature' by Bertozzi & Casoni, i.e. waste and leftovers of food, such as Sparecchiatura di maggio, Mai più, Che cos'è la vita, or like Disgrazia con tulipani rossi (2012), where the rubbish acts as a clod from which a luxuriant bouquet of tulips populated by butterflies is born, as if to signal that even from the most sordid situations a marvel of nature can come to life. Between compositional surrealism and formal hyperrealism, Bertozzi & Casoni have been investigating the waste of contemporary society for years, in a staging in which lunges into degradation and sudden beauties alternate.
Among other works, here are the contemporary vanitas of Auguri and 23 December, both from 2015, in which a skull and a bucranium (the skeleton of an ox head) are placed on top of birthday cakes, or again of Ossobello (2002 ), an orderly accumulation of bones.
Among the unpublished works, the imposing Brillo box with parrots stands out, a composition of 'Warholian' boxes of Brillo detergent, often used by Bertozzi & Casoni, from which very colorful parrots sprout, which are also very present in their creations.
The Palermitan exhibition confirms the mastery of Giampaolo Bertozzi (Borgo Tossignano, Bologna, 1957) and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni (Lugo di Romagna, Ravenna, 1961) in working with a material as complex as polychrome ceramics, “whose potential – declared the two – they are really many and which we find very congenial and attractive due to its great plastic and pictorial possibilities, which in fact make it the most suitable material for a painted sculpture”.
