The drawing of the drawing - Museo Novecento

Where and when

From

20December 2018

28February 2019

Museo Novecento

First Floor

The drawing of the drawing (from 20 December 2018 to 28 February 2019) – this is the title of the third stage of the multi-year project dedicated to the most ancient practice of art.

Exhibition Hours

Winter Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

8:00 pm

Thursday

On this occasion, unlike the two past exhibitions (The drawing of the sculptor and Artists at the Theater. Drawings for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), the exhibition path curated by Saretto Cincinelli partially deviates from the logic that animated the exhibitions previously set up in the rooms on the first floor of the museum: in fact, he does not focus his attention on a privileged orientation of drawing towards another discipline, but on the intrinsic versatility of drawing as such.

At the center of the exhibition, which investigates the practice and gesture of drawing starting from the work of eleven artists who matured close to the end of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century (Massimo Bartolini, Emanuele Becheri, Chiara Camoni, Antonio Catelani, Giulia Cenci, Daniela De Lorenzo, Carlo Guaita, Paolo Meoni, Margherita Moscardini, Andrea Santarlasci and Massimiliano Turco) is not so much what manifests itself through drawing as what emerges and imposes itself as a drawing, amplifying the boundaries of the category.

The traditional view of drawing is therefore heavily resized, as something preparatory to a project: here, on the contrary, drawing is not in the place of anything other than itself. The works on display evoke the gesture of tracing more than the traced figure, voluntarily focusing on the dynamic and evocative dimension of the act of drawing.

Daniela De Lorenzo, Differita, 2018.

Massimiliano Turco.

Paolo Meoni, Appennino.

On display different media (photography, sculpture, embroidery) that propose an “enlarged” concept of drawing, referring to the idea of skiagraphia or photographia (writing of shadow or light) that Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia places at the origin mythic of the discipline.
In the Plinian story, the drawing is born from a substitute image. We must not forget that Butade, daughter of a Corinthian potter, does not portray her model “from life”, but fixes the contours of her shadow. “His sign thus circumscribes a weakened and ghostly presence, a quasi-absence – explains Cincinelli -. It is from this founding myth that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida starts when, in Memoires d’aveugle, he notices the impossibility for the designer to keep his gaze fixed on the model and at the same time on the line he is tracing“.

Emanuele Becheri, Figura, 2017, terracotta refrattaria, ossido di manganese, 30x22x21cm

This is how Massimo Bartolini‘s ‘seasonal’ gardens, Antonio Catelani‘s ‘posthumous’ sinopias, the emergence of the figures in the forming gesture of Emanuele Becheri‘s terracottas, duplications evoking a short circuit between what has disappeared and what never stops resurface by Andrea Santarlasci; the infinite, minute signatures of Massimiliano Turco‘s marble pages traced to a becoming, which shows the sense of a mutant repetition.

And again the sculptures incorporating the drawing of his own material genesis by Daniela De Lorenzo, the self-portraits traced without ever looking at the sheet of Chiara Camoni, the extra-representative presentations of the Senza titolo (Chiasmi) and the Prosopopee of Carlo Guaita, the Atlas by Margherita Moscardini which, through an unprecedented performative display, shows multitudes aggregated in a public space from which the architectures are subtracted and, finally, in the black and white photographs by Paolo Meoni and Giulia Cenci, a sort of instantaneous drawings that in their platitude they return the abstract internal rhythm of a natural scenario or play the role of preparatory notes and sketches evoking works to come.