Roots of Being

18th March – 19th August 2023
The second floor, instead, hosts the temporary exhibition devoted to the works of Alessandro Twombly. His art charms and involves the visitor, whilst intriguing and surprising, often eluding us, as well: difficult, if not impossible to seize it in the fist of a single definition, positioning it in a box that might delimit it according to definite themes and forms: for it is not uniform but plural by nature. Indeed, Twombly is both a painter and a sculptor and works according to the rapid and liquid rhythm of oil paints or acrylics, yet then needs to settle to the slower, more solid and compact pace of sculpture. The diapason of his production moves equally between the figurative and the abstract, with clear hints at informal language, though never coinciding fully with these categories. He paints flowers and patches of sky but not still life or landscapes, moving decidedly beyond the canons of naturalistic depiction; his titles hint at “weather” which is never the atmospheric weather of summer or winter days; he suggests images with bunches of yellow irises about to wither forever and a title that adresses you directly, declaring “It’s the moment/Questo è il momento”; in another painting – all of them are large in size – one seems to see a strange, dancing monster silhouetted against the sky, whilst in the mind echo the ambiguous and sinister words of the title: One day the Message was sent/Un giorno il messaggio fu inviato. In short, one is caught suspended between fascination and apprehension, not knowing whether one is confronted with a world of flowers, beauty and sumptuous colour or perhaps something not so well-defined that might come to pass and call to you directly.

But Twombly’s art is also joyful and full of life, overflowing with energy and colour; despite this, it is impossible to place it in a recognizable visual and mental territory, since its very nature is ‘polymorphous’ – to quote a title once again – not only in the sense that he shifts continually between painting and sculpture and vice-versa, but also from one painting to the next, which follows it immediately or “accompanies” it: as though there were an uninterrupted dialogue moving through the works and disciplines.

For the occasion of the exhibition a volume will be published containing reproductions of the works exhibited, an essay in Italian by Claudio Guarda and an English text by Richard Milazzo.