Piazza Collicola
06049 Spoleto PG
Italia
The opening of Giorgio Ortona’s exhibition, will take place on SATURDAY 30 JUNE at 12.00 at Palazzo Collicola Visual Arts. The exhibition is curated by Gianluca Marziani and included in the Festival Of Two Worlds’ official programme.
The Press Conference will be at 11.00 at the Piano Nobile’s gallery.
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Settantasette Gallery (Milan).
Rome. Pigneto. Via Braccio da Montone: a low building is in front of us, whose first floor is Giorgio Ortona’s studio, in a district that stigmatizes the merits and faults of a complex city, fabulous in evidences but decadent in attitude; a metropolis that here at the Pigneto weaves mixed building with creativity, a multi-ethnic knot with a nightlife, proletariat and technological tertiary of the new generation. From here, between Casilina and Prenestina, an author’s gaze with a drone’s philosophy scans open-field heights offering a concentric and lenticular vision of a building speculative, commercial, dissonant, populous modern Rome…
Giorgio Ortona paints not only what he sees but what his eyes smell, what his ears taste, what his mouth hears… an apparent contradiction of the senses, a true mirror of a brush that resolves the semantic contrast inside itself: a dirty yet surgical painting, swarming but dry, realistic and mental at the same time. It is a painting of healed contrasts, where the same frame of raw wood, while imitating the building site pallet, is turned into a spacer with perfect calibration. A contradiction that is also resolved in the depths: you can glimpse lines, numbers and notches that reveal the architectural nature of the table, as if the background were the cellulose on which the author designs the visions. Here the soul of an architect comes out, his past at university and his mental disposition; the angle of view that emerges certifies an imprinting but also its short-circuit, thanks to a language, painting, that redefines the deep feeling of architecture.
Painting is the habitable architecture of interior spaces
Giorgio Ortona’s Rome becomes a matrix and a genetic code, a figurative genome that crosses multiple places of the 20th century. Don’t think, however, of the usual unmade suburban capital; here, on the contrary, the beautiful social housing of the 1960s is told, some Umbertine façades between Esquiline and Colle Oppio, some residential masterpieces in Prati and San Giovanni, many monolithic buildings that fit well into the urban context, often among snake-like bypasses, elevated roads, connections and strips of asphalt. Ortona maps the Capitoline city between roofs and antennas, balconies and public greenery, creates geographies of reinforced concrete, enhances the building site with the equipment of scaffolding and cranes soaring … one could say: for some time Rome was not so “Roman” in a picture; it should be added: a Rome so meticulous as to become universal, archetype of any place grown up for crossbreeds, cultural exchanges, collective energy, political power and economic investment.
Ortona’s Rome is also the city of beloved faces, of similar bodies, of sensitive objects that capture his emotional trust. It is a world of living affections and sensations, a watchful bond with the prose of everyday life: the city outside, people and objects in apartments, on terraces, in front of a door, inside a shop, standing on the street, wherever the body, a food or an object are biological integrations of the pulsating city. The self-portrait itself, now exhibited with some variations, involves t-shirts or vests that the author, having died out in the white paint, wore at the time of the photo, thus offering us a portrait by absences, by urban evocations, by background noises.
Ortona’s urban imaginary is born from above, through Google Earth’s panoramic images. Hence the creation of a pictorial grid in which realism joins the erasures of colour, the evoked absences, the sudden fades. Areas that did not deserve a celebration, that clashed in context, that polluted the architectural eye of Ortona, they just disappeared. Merely apparent absences that turn into bands of color, recalling Nicolas De Staël and Alberto Burri, electrifying the painting with abstract volumes, so plastic as to merge with the real city.
The paintings will be accompanied by Storie di Pittura (Stories of Painting), a video that tells the artist’s life and work. An appendix that summarizes the narrative of a unique journey in the city that does not sleep, in the neighborhoods with high human temperatures, in the private worlds of an artist who architect, day by day, his inner rooms. The video was realized by Sintesi Visiva.
A passer-by through the Pigneto would say: “how cool this picture by Ortona…”
F.I.C.O. ovvero, Feticci Individui Case Oggetti
www.giorgioortona.com
The exhibition ends on Sunday 7 October 2018
Info: www.palazzocollicola.it https://www.facebook.com/PALAZZOCOLLICOLA
Palazzo Collicola: info@palazzocollicola.it
Sistema Museo: ufficiostampa@sistemamuseo.it
