From 25 October 2020 to 6 January 2021, Volumnia, the space dedicated to art and design, inside a deconsecrated church in the center of Piacenza, hosts the personal exhibition of Giorgio Milani, Writing as an enigma.
The exhibition, curated by Elena Pontiggia, offers 120 works by the artist from Piacenza, including largely unpublished paintings and sculptures, divided into ten sections documenting his most important cycles, from Gutenberg Towers Two and poets Nibujon West, from Sublimations Shroudsdi Gutenberg and You sing to Rare Shadows.
Giorgio Milani's expressive figure revolves around assemblages of movable wooden types for printing that are no longer in use that the artist finds and collects in the warehouses of old typographies and recycles as materials for art. They are characters which, ideally, keep the memory of everything they have printed, the memory of all human knowledge.
Those carved woods, different in shape and size, and also in material and production period, are no longer used as tools to leave the imprint of letters or other signs on the page, but to build three-dimensional works; they are works that do not present printed words and images, but rather physically real words and images, to be touched as well as seen.
As Elena Pontiggia writes in the introduction to the catalogue: “Milani's writing, his poets, do not make up a rational catalog or a scholastic filing, but are, if anything, the place of the enigma, not because they reveal the mystery, but because they reveal that the mystery exists. Letters and signs are collected in orthogonal movements, within squares and rectangles, in rhythmic and musical spaces, but they cannot be read in an orderly and judicious manner. Try to read them: you won't succeed, because they are hermetic like the leaves of the Sibyl. I am an encyclopedia of Babel, that is of incomprehension”.
A catalog accompanies the exhibition THE GOLDS Contemporary Publishers, with text by Elena Pontiggia and an interview by Matteo Galbiati with Giorgio Milani.
GIORGIO MILANI (Piacenza, 1946)
I poets that characterize his current production are the result of a journey that began in the mid-sixties and developed in the study of the relationship between image and writing.
I poets made in the late 80s, they were exhibited for the first time in 1997 in Milan in the exhibition “Late Gutenberg poets”, organized by the Stelline Foundation with the patronage of the Municipality of Milan and curated by Thomas Trini.
Since then the notoriety of his Poetari has expanded in Italy and abroad.
In 2002 the Druckunst Museum in Leipzig is dedicating an important personal exhibition to him.
In 2005 he was invited to the XIV Quadriennale in Rome where he exhibited “open work”, a great poet made up of about 1.800 friezes and typographic characters.
In 2007 the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) organized the largest exhibition of Poetari in Bonn, one hundred works including paintings and sculptures from various European countries.
In 2009 he was among the sixteen international artists invited to Berlin for the realization of some works inside the State Library Unter den Linden.
In 2010 he created in Salsomaggiore "Open work between East and West" spectacular sculpture-fountain in bronze and steel located in the context of urban redevelopment in Piazza Lorenzo Berzieri.
In 2011 he inaugurated his greatest work-poetry, "Echo of Steps in Memory", in the context of the restoration and recovery of Campiello di Vigonovo (VE), by installing 190 laser-cut corten panels on the entire facade of the historic building with verses chosen together with Philippe Daverio.
In 2013 he exhibited a video and five sculptures in a solo exhibition in Berlin "From Babel to the stake" in the spaces of the Italian Embassy, and at the same time, at the Italian Cultural Institute, ten poets and frottage in an exhibition entitled "From Babel to dialogue".
In the same year, on the occasion of the Year of Italian Culture in the United States, he exhibited in New York in two personal exhibitions: "Poetaries and frottage” edited by Philippe Daverio at the Consulate General of Italy and “White Words” at Boffi Soho.
In 2014 he designed and built the Portal of the Church of Santa Franca entitled "The Gate of Light” and the laser-worked corten steel façade of the Madonna di Lourdes in Piacenza.
In 2016 he inaugurated a new series of white works entitled "New poets". Sublimations, Shrouds, Carvings at Villa Rospigliosi, Spicchio di Lamporecchio (Pistoia) with texts by Marco Senaldi, Luciano Caramel, Tommaso Trini, Philippe Daverio.
In 2018 Whitelight Art Gallery organizes three solo exhibitions entitled “I make Art with words” in Milan, Rome and Turin.
VOLUMNIA – ENRICA DE MICHELI
Volumnia is a project around design and art that inhabits the spaces of a deconsecrated church in the center of Piacenza. Renaissance heart and foundations, eighteenth-century facade, it is a breathtaking space steeped in history, with roots at the foot of majestic colonnades that rise dozens of meters from the ground.
The gallerist Enrica De Micheli, whose activity has ranged between antiques and design for more than twenty years, has started the enhancement of this historic building which will host a bistro and an intense cultural program in its exhibition space.
