After their debut at the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. at the beginning of the 80ies, Bertozzi & Casoni - now internationally renowned - return to exhibit within the gallery walls. The main theme of the show is the homage to Giorgio Morandi presented both: with a selection of "Flowers" and "Landscapes" by the Master and with real "d'aprés Morandi" conceived by Bertozzi & Casoni interpreting and filtering Morandi's lesson through ceramics their favorite medium.
In Bertozzi & Casoni's artworks – some of them originally made in 2019 for an exhibition at the Morandi Museum - the palette changes from bright to pastel, and their investigation into vanitas and memento mori – realized through snapshots of flora and fauna and through the leftovers of consumer civilization – now involves Morandi's flowers. Interpreted by them, the flowers hide among the petals a presence of life with iridescent colors: small insects ready to turn into an ambiguous rebus, which leaves the door opened to several answers.
What Giorgio Morandi pursued throughout his life was a pictorial investigation conducted on a very limited series of subjects: still lives with every-day objects (the iconic bottles), vases of flowers and the landscape of Grizzana, a small town in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines where the artist used to spend the summer months. These are images from everyday life known to everyone, which constituted for Morandi a mere formal pretext. It is precisely the ordinariness of these subjects that allowed the Master to focus his attention on the core of his research: the composition of space as an environmental unity of all the elements that constitute it. A space conceived as an interior place that, sign after sign, takes shape on the engraved plate or on the canvas. A reconstructed space, in order to capture its infinite duration, not at all its instantaneity: that is why, when Morandi painted landscapes, he never returned on the same view, and why the flowers he preferred to depict were not the fresh ones, destined to change day after day, creating variations beyond his control, but the dried or silk ones, which, just like the other objects, protagonists of his still lifes, would have maintained their state unaltered, creating a variety of tonal effects thanks to the dust deposited on them, little by little. The suspension of time is present in every one of his works and it is precisely this placing himself at the edges of the flow of time that makes the great master's lesson relevant today.
On this occasion, Maggiore g.a.m. intends to give space to the interpretation that the contemporary artistic duo Bertozzi & Casoni makes of Giorgio Morandi's iconic flower pots; a dialogue to which Museo Morandi gave visibility in 2019 with the exhibition "Bertozzi & Casoni. Eulogy to Fake Flowers."
The predilection for flora and fauna present in all of Bertozzi & Casoni's works, along with the focus on the iconographic themes of vanitas andmemento mori that characterizes their research, made Morandi's theme of flowers an ideal subject to interpret through a multitude of evocations. If Morandi observed reality in order to capture its abstract essence, fixing it in timeless images, Bertozzi & Casoni transfigure it three-dimensionally thanks to ceramics: "matter" par excellence that, once manipulated, becomes the presential sign of a snapshot captured in hyper-realistic forms, reconstructed in the smallest detail.
But just as the antipodes at the end of the tour end up meeting and then blurring, it is possible to point out some elements of continuity between Morandi and Bertozzi & Casoni: the ambiguity between life and absence of life and between instantaneousness and suspension, together with the primacy of one's own inner world in order to interpret reality. In fact, if Morandi's works focus on few subjects in order to suggest a mental image preserved and reactivated by memory, Bertozzi & Casoni also choose certain sets of objects through a careful look that searches for a link between the aesthetic and visible form and the emotional state that moved the research itself. Less is more becomes then a maxim able to tell us the poetics of these artists so apparently distant: the concentration of the Master on those few, repeated subjects marks the greatness of his research, while the works by Bertozzi & Casoni allow us to explore with the right attention the richness of tactile and visual information that makes them the ironic and disillusioned singers of our society of accumulation and hyper productivity.
With the postponement of the opening to February 12, 2022, we intend to open a new year of art through a widespread exhibition in the venues of Bologna and Milan - by appointment via info@maggioregam.com - and in conjunction with the exhibition in the room dedicated to the "Morandian Library" inside ACP - Palazzo Franchetti in Venice (more info: www.acp-palazzofranchetti.com)
