Where and when
From
To
Museo Novecento
“Incanto” is the first exhibition in a public institution by the duo of young artists Irene Montini & Rocco Gurrieri. The exhibition, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Luca Puri, was born from the ribs of an unreleased film produced by the Museo Novecento. The two artists – both photographers and directors – drew a series of large-format photographs from the settings of the film, creating a cinematographic and visual experiment that consists of a photo gallery and a small cinema room.
Exhibition Hours
Winter Hours
Monday – Sunday
11:00 am
–
8:00 pm
Thursday
The photographic series shows the themes of the work, the upheaval of the domestic environment and the taking over of the magical element in reality. On the second floor, the projection dialogues with an “alien plant”, a sculpture by the scenographer Matteo Pucci which constitutes the central pivot of the narrative of this fairy tale.
“Incanto it is a black fairy tale where the family home becomes a place of shadow and passage between fantastic and diabolical worlds. It is a terrible fairy tale, an adolescent, spiritual, poetic and murderous education takes place in large country houses similar to abandoned old ladies. The protagonists of these fables, unique and special beings, are approached and dragged away from a fantastic world to which they secretly belong. Only some traces of their passage, visible to the attentive eyes, remain in our reality”, explain the curators of the exhibition.
Two sisters left alone by their pianist mother are forced to spend the summer at the large house of their uncles. Slowly kidnapped by new games, amoral ideas and forbidden books, the two lose control over their desires, evoking a nameless evil that manifests itself as a poisonous organism, a deceptive passage between this and other worlds. Some time later, in another era and in another summer, an abandoned and curious girl named Madeleine learns of the events related to their fate and begins to investigate. They are sweet and merciless stories, out of tune ballads of lonely girls destined by nature to separate from their families to slip into different, magical and ferocious places.
The themes of growth, the discovery of sexuality and the fascination for mystery permeate most of the Irene Montini and Rocco Gurrieri production, which aims to tell experiences through expedients that transcend reality. Magic, neither good nor bad, lurks around every corner. The colorful sets, full of details and the extremely present styling play with sharp irony on the edge of an inner turmoil, between love and death, sex and innocence. Their works evoke a dreamlike sensorial overload always on the verge of turning into a nightmare and are proposed as a transversal journey between art and fashion where the research is aimed at a subtle overturning of the precarious concept of “normality”.
Irene Montini and Rocco Gurrieri
They are a duo of photographers and directors. They have been working together since 2017 creating editorials, fashion films, experimental animations, illustrations and comics. Irene graduated in photography while Rocco comes from a background as an assistant in two film production houses. The first works are animations shot in stop motion technique, Il Tè delle 5 and Giallo spaghetti. They have published Fashion films and editorials for “Vice”, “Id”, “Schön magazine”, “Contributor magazine”, “Dazed Beauty”, “Infringe Magazine”, “Navel magazine”, “Just magazine”, Luisa via Roma, Nike , Ferragamo, Reebok. After directing the documentary Sustainable Thinking for the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum in 2019 and having taken the shots for the catalog of the exhibition of the same name, they start the path that leads them to create the Incanto exhibition. In their work they relive the atmospheres of the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Dorothea Tanning, the spells of Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio, the alienating settings of David Lynch, Fellini, master of dreams and magic and Nathalie’s pulp art. Djurberg. The constant references to food and sexual metaphors draw on Jan Švankmajer’s surreal stop motion animations and Suzan Pitt’s colorful psychological in-cubes. Irreverent stories with no happy ending.
Installation Views
Artist
Irene Montini & Rocco Gurrieri
Curated by
Sergio Risaliti
Luca Puri
Scientific Coordination
Francesca Neri
Press
Elisa Di Lupo
Press Office Comune di Firenze
Ludovica Zarrilli
Tabloid Soc Coop
Lea Codognato | Caterina Briganti
Davis&Co.
Comunication
Mus.e
Visual Identity
FRUSH Design Studio
Ideation
Dania Menafra
Realizzation
Ph Credits
Leonardo Morfini
With the contribution of
Fondazione CR Firenze