De Chirico, Leonor Fini, Schifano: a new exhibition at Ferrara's Castello Estense

From July 2 to December 27, 2022, in Ferrara, the Sala dei Comuni of the Castello Estense will host a new exhibition entitled La memoria infedele. The Seduction of Images from de Chirico to Schifano. This is a dossier exhibition realized by the Art Museums Service of the Municipality of Ferrara and the Ferrara Arte Foundation, under the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region, curated by Chiara Vorrasi, and is a new appointment in an exhibition program dedicated to the city’s museum heritage through focuses on artists and thematic nuclei, which has so far featured Giovanni Boldini and Filippo De Pisis. The focus is now on works from the civic collections that evoke the postmodern climate of the late 20th century and the renewed fascination with the figurative arts.

The selection consists of twelve works, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and includes nine of the nearly two hundred pieces from the private collection of Franco Farina (director of the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna and the Palazzo dei Diamanti exhibition center from the 1960s to the 1990s), which was donated to the city in 2019 by his widow, Lola Bonora. The project is also in connection with the extensive exhibition dedicated, also at the Castello, to the Ferrarese artist transplanted to Berlin , Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani, whose parabola began in that varied artistic and cultural season .

Beginning in the 1970s, many artists reclaimed the traditional practices of painting and sculpture that had been banned by the avant-garde. The history of images returns to be interrogated as an immense repertoire of figurative models from which to draw new interpretive keys to represent the complexity of existence in the age of mass communication.

Precursor and creator of every modern “return to craft” and to the secrets of the great masters, since 1916 Giorgio de Chirico had advocated a vision of circular time, where past and future are welded into an eternal present, in tune with the thought of ancient and contemporary philosophers, from Heraclitus to Nietzsche. The “modern artist par excellence” is therefore the “conscious man who feels the legacy of centuries and centuries of art and thought, who sees clearly in the past, in the present and in himself” (1945). The exhibition tour then begins with the “citationist” works of the 1950s-1970s in which de Chirico borrowed the pictorial exuberance of the Baroque or revisited with different techniques the mannequins of his own Metaphysical production of the 1910s. His example comes to the attention of younger generations, as in the case of an international protagonist of the pop season such as Mario Schifano. With his iconic reinterpretations of the effigies of our civilization--whether equestrian monuments, the water lilies dear to Monet, or Futurist proclamations--Schifano wants to reaffirm the suggestive power of art in the face of the hegemony of the mass media image. The exhibition presents two of his paintings(Untitled, 1978, Acquatico, 1988) along with works by artists who, with different paths but similar intentions, have ironically and subtly reinterpreted the various genres of tradition: Remo Bianco ’s Hot Sculpture (1965) is a classical torso covered in a modern chrome patina and electrically heated to invite the viewer to materially reconnect with the work of art; in turn, Carlo Mattioli in the 1980s condenses the landscape into its vital essence as a stylized tree, making dense textural foliage stand out against undefined backgrounds; while Paola Bonora in an enigmatic portrait from the 1990s relies on the gesturality of the body to reveal the personality of the subject, whose face is cut out of the frame.

Finally, it is Leonor Fini’s Unfaithful Memory, which gave the title to the course, that highlights the critical detachment that accompanies the postmodern retrospective gaze. A mysterious dandy in eighteenth-century costume observes a painting by the same author(Twilight of the Morning) that is reproduced with several variations within the work, which itself is dense with citations to Renaissance, Baroque and Symbolist art: in fact, every evocation of the past is destined to rewrite its meaning.

Image: Giorgio De Chirico, Two Horses (1950-1959; Ferrara, Civic Collections)

De Chirico, Leonor Fini, Schifano: a new exhibition at Ferrara's Castello Estense

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