"Without discovering of the past, discovering the present is not possible". With these words Giorgio de Chirico reveals to the viewer his intention to frequent the museum to use every find in his works and thus go "beyond physics", thus moving outside of the world he is currently in to a dimension that is precisely Metaphysical.
After the first avant-gardes whose aim was to break with everything that was already seen and already done in order to be original at all costs, De Chirico chooses instead to be "original" and to turn to that mythological universe that has its roots in the glorious past of the history of the peoples of the Mediterranean. But be careful because in De Chirico's work, directing the vector towards the past should not be interpreted as a simple work of emulation and recovery of a distant time too perfect to be surpassed, but on the contrary, Giorgio de Chirico uses the ruin or the archaeological find in the same way in which Marcel Duchamp takes a banal everyday object to create his ready-mades, that is: claiming an aesthetic value for every object and circumstance pre-existing to him. De Chirico's is undoubtedly a sensational return, a reunion in the history of art that aims not only to dust off memory and tradition, the rich images hidden in the storerooms of museums, full of forgotten or abandoned masterpieces in favor of a modernity "at all costs", but also to ennoble the squalid places of the present through their insertion into those of an illustrious past. The exhibition presented at the Museo Civico Archeologico in Chianciano Terme also fits into this context, presenting De Chirico's sculptural work alongside vases and canopic jars from a permanent collection that boasts Etruscan, but also Roman and prehistoric finds. And just as Val di Chiana is a rich and jealous guardian of its past, while living in the present, watching over the sophisticated dialectic between recollection and invention, memory and renewal, De Chirico inserts his faceless figures, his inscrutable mannequins, those famous "Disquieting Muses" that populate his universe in enigma and silence, living as guardians between what has been and what will be in an eternal present, in a continuous return, in a different repetition. Muses that also return in his sculptures. In fact, sculpture is, in De Chirico, the natural continuation of painting. As Raffaele Carrieri writes: "the subjects are more or less the same as the paintings: horses, knights, Dioscuri, twin archaeologists, Arianne. The hand that modeled them has retraced the adventurous ideal and concrete journey of his many pictorial experiences. It is a natural continuation. The development is identical, the way of proceeding is identical, the same clarity and richness of chiaroscuro [...]. The thumb is fluid and, like the brushstroke, enriches the surface wherever it rests, determining and hooking new vibrations".
De Chirico's first sculptural works, mostly in terracotta, date back to the late 1930s and early 1940s, and then continued with enthusiasm in the 1960s when he translated those molds into bronze, before dedicating himself to the creation of new subjects. From the same creative force from which many of his pictorial works spring, the neo-metaphysical sculptural works or those with neo-baroque reminiscences are born, as in the case of the series dedicated to horses and knights.
By immersing a completely modern anguish in a classical world, Giorgio de Chirico gives new expressive vigor to resonances that are, and will be, eternal. T.W. Earp's words are perfect: "The works reveal a classical master, even if the ideas are expressed in a modern way."
Franco Calarota
