Where and when
Museo Novecento
The installation by Paolo Parisi presents itself to visitors with an installation on the external gate, placed in dialogue with Piazza Santa Maria Novella, the work of Paolo Parisi in collaboration with the students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. The installation – which bears the inscription Museo – arises from an appropriation of signs present in the museum’s collection, and is made up of individual letters “borrowed” from the works of Luciano Ori, Ketty la Rocca, Paolo Scheggi, from futurist posters and from the pages of Lacerba magazine.
“Speaking through the most representative works of the twentieth century currents present in the collection, of the instances that have always motivated the presence of a Museum within the urban fabric means promoting and representing the actuality of the memory of our contemporary civilization – explains Paolo Parisi -. This reflection offered an excellent research opportunity for the graphics students of the Academy of Fine Arts, giving them the opportunity, through the connection between the avant-garde instances of the last century and today’s methods of communication, to confront themselves with the public space. , experimenting the boundaries of a specific one, that of graphics but in a broader sense of visual culture, which today includes a wide range of practices: from the artist’s edition to communication graphics. Spaces that, although different in purpose, have built the recent history of graphic language through their dialogue“.
The Paolo Parisi Museum transforms the word into an object with an aesthetic value, like an image, a painting or a sculpture. Parisi took some samples from a dictionary of letters, styles and forms, transforming it into a sort of tribute to the short century. Each letter traces in character and style a verbal sign that has been extrapolated from the work of another artist or a movement of the twentieth century. In a game of historical-artistic, graphic and aesthetic associations, whose leitmotiv seems to be Florence, the first letter, M, comes from a collage by Luciano Ori All the best of ’65 (Carlo Palli collection); the letter U from the title page of the magazine Firenze Futurista of 1921 (year I, number 2); the S from the work of Giuseppe Chiari Art is to say dated ’64, (also in the Palli collection); the E from a painting by Corrado Cagli from ’52 At the foot of Parnassus (Baloyannis) and finally the O from the work of Paolo Scheggi Inter-en-cubo from ’69.
“Parisi’s installation – Risaliti argues – is a tribute to the word MUSEUM – the house of the muses – with all the aura that this definition carries, a key to understanding the poetics and work of many twentieth-century artists including Marcel Duchamp , Marcel Broodthaers, Giulio Paolini and many others. A conceptual action that has the air of being not an ideological manifesto, but an artistic and poetic one. A way to rejuvenate that term used so often to identify Florence as a museum city in an exaggeratedly conservative sense. Instead, let’s look at the Museum and Florence as a home and laboratory of art, as a place of experimentation and invention, without ever forgetting that the Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne.“