Giorgio Morandi, il suo viaggio nella storia di famiglia

Tonight at 6 p.m., Galleria d'Arte Maggiore opens the exhibition dedicated to Giorgio Morandi, the painter who, more than any other, marked the history of the gallery itself, which has proposed, during its forty years in business, both monographic exhibitions and interesting dialogues with contemporary artists, such as Ettore Spalletti, Tong Yanrunan and Robert Ryman. The exhibition is very characteristic of the artist, being based on little thematic and tonal variations, on a wise balance between voids and fulls, on faint tremors of the painted objects, reduced to "unstable, elusive visual presences, crossed by a restlessness that recalls something metaphysical and existential", as art historian Francesco Poli wrote a few years ago. The still life from 1940 is beautiful, uneasy in the rapid spreading of the background colour and in the use of the shading, and keeps up a distant dialogue with the one from 1941, coming from the Arcangeli collection, which is even darker and shakier, and where the objects seem to be melted together, as if they were made out of dark clay. Positive and negative volumes, fulls and voids, a sense of gravity and lightness, delicate powder-coloured tones and darker tints, tell about a plastic evidence of the things represented, in a clear and yet unsure way at the same time, capable of absorbing the gaze of the spectator. Morandi's works are always silent. They need an empty space around them, as the clean and simple setting up underlines. That same suspended silence that envelopes the three landscapes exposed on the central wall, which move from the simpler naturalistic translation of the Landscape from 1929 placed in the center, to a beautiful, almost "abstract" landscape from 1943, where the houses become geometrical solids, cubes and parallelepipeds capable of casting mighty and earthy shadows. The exhibition is completed by the room with the drawings and the etchings, which gathers a wide repertoire of different themes and techniques, that also render the modernity of the graphic work, capable of variations of mark and hatching, steady and tight or free and loose, depending on the moments in his life and his inner visions. A complete portrait of the artist by the gallery that for years has proposed Morandi exhibits both in Italy and abroad: a will to start again from Bologna, his hometown, to widen to contemporary tales.