Taormina, works en plein air at the Teatro antico for the centenary of Pietro Consagra

On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Pietro Consagra (Mazara del Vallo, 1920 - Milan, 2005), from May 17 to October 30, 2021, the Teatro antico in Taormina hosts the exhibition Pietro Consagra. Color as Matter, curated by Gabriella Di Milla and Paolo Falcone and promoted by the Sicilian Region, Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity, the Naxos Taormina Archaeological Park, and organized by Electa in collaboration with the Pietro Consagra Archive.

An en plein air itinerary in which a selection of works by the artist completed between 1964 and 2003 weaves a dialogue with the memories of Taormina’s Ancient Theater and the surrounding landscape.

For Consagra, sculpture is “fantasy, research, experience and provocation,” and this exhibition aims to propose an interpretation, through new perceptive and linguistic codes of contemporaneity.

The exhibition path begins with the sculpture White Suspended Piano (1964), a sharp semantic break made by the Sicilian artist in his career, disruptive compared to previous works; the work is suspended on one of the two pàrodoi of the theater, frontal to the cavea and the spectators. Through the poetics of frontality, Consagra has in fact established the conditions for an immediate dialogue, with a free and in turn responsive observer, creating the premises of participatory art. This work belongs to the same turning point as the Gardens and Transparent Irons of 1964-66, monochrome, white, pink, violet, blue, carmine, lilac, and black works that curve, fragment, and swell, placing themselves in the viewer’s eyes as mobile psychic objects of double frontality, in a liberating loosening of moral tension. As will be noted from the White Garden (1966), color takes on, from this moment on, an intensity and uniformity such that it erases the material from which it is invisibly supported, expressing Consagra’s new openness to an individual happiness. New dynamics of the gaze and the body will also be activated by the exhibited Matacubo, a sculpture with rounded and sensual forms. The item, in Sicilian dialect, defines very compact and often bulky objects, but it is used by the artist as a “paradoxical” term for playful works made of marble and painted iron.

Since the beginning of his artistic journey, Consagra renewed his sculpture almost every decade; his sculpture was not isolated in itself but entered the social and civil space, conveying an autonomous and authentic thought.

The exhibition is intended to be a synthesis of the artist’s incessant search for expressive techniques, materials and colors with which works were made that were intended to arouse a sense of freedom and a stimulus to reflect on contemporary events. There is in Consagra’s work a fascinating apparent contradiction: the sublimation of frontal vision dematerializes the sculpture by detaching it from reality, but it is only in order to observe and question it, as does the chorus that, outside the scene, attends the performance and dialogues with the viewer.

For info: www.parconaxostaormina.com

Hours: Daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Tickets: Full 13.50 euros, reduced 8.50 euros.

Pictured is the installation at the Teatro antico in Taormina of the Pietro Consagra exhibition. Color as matter. Photo by Fabrizio Villa. © Pietro Consagra, by SIAE 2021

Taormina, works en plein air at the Teatro antico for the centenary of Pietro Consagra

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