Angelo Bellobono's works born in the mountains of Abruzzo on display at MAXXI L'Aquila

From May 12 to June 12, MAXXI L’Aquila opens its doors to Mappa Appennino, the new exhibition by Angelo Bellobono (Nettuno, 1964). Angelo Bellobono’s painting recounts a five-year-long journey on theApennine mountain range, of which L’ Aquila is the symbolic city. Begun in solitude at the Charles Moulin Hut refuge on Mount Marrone, the artist’s itinerancy was later nourished by encounters with people and territories, expert hikers and farmers, animals and tutelary deities, and then poured onto the canvas through a process of memory, experience and experimentation.

The works in the exhibition interrogate the fragilities and stratifications of the Apennine territory and question boundary lines between geographical areas, regions and landscapes. Large canvases invade the space according to an irregular rhythm that refers to the unstable balance typical of the experience in the mountains. The artist invites the visitor to take a step inside the landscape itself, capturing its unevenness, its precarious balances, its changing proportions and in which to search for details of matter while remaining suspended between a lightly spread color and an impromptu pictorial gesture.

The exhibition extends into the space of Fondazione Giorgio de Marchis Bonanni D’Ocre Onlus where works are exhibited that trace the entire Linea1201 project, the residency program spread over the Apennine territory that, in the summer of 2020, took the artist to work on the peaks, from the Mainarde, to Mount Alpi, then in the Samoggia Valley in Emilia-Romagna to the Laga Mountains. The last stop was Amatrice, here the artist chose to call in three other artists who in different ways relate to painting: Chris Rocchegiani, Davide D’Elia and Beatrice Meoni. In fact, in the exhibition, the dialogue shared during the days of residency between the four artists is re-proposed through the bringing together of works born “elbow to elbow” in the temporary studio at the Casa della Montagna that hosted them.

From the words of Angelo Bellobono: “After more than two years spent inhabiting it, meeting it and searching for it, the time has come for painting to compose itself or decompose into a pictorial distillate, a wineskin of Aeolus pulsating with steps, air, woods, heights, wounds, encounters. For me, seeing my painting in the exhibition corresponds to a temporary stop from which it is then necessary to start again, because I know that the painted landscape is the pretext for meeting it from life.”

On the occasion of the exhibition, two summit walks with Angelo Bellobono will be organized for Saturday, May 21 and June 11.

For all information, you can visit the official website of MAXXI L’Aquila.

Pictured: Angelo Bellobono, I am forest (2022; acrylic and oil on canvas, 200x200 cm)

Angelo Bellobono's works born in the mountains of Abruzzo on display at MAXXI L'Aquila

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