Ma non ho bicchieri come i tuoi
Curated by Marco Tonelli and Lorenzo Fiorucci
Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto
13 November 2021– 13 February 2022
An unpredictable, eccentric painting exhibition, a dialogue between two artists who work on the very margins of images and representation, line and ornament, illusion and meaning.
Maurizio Cannavacciuolo (1954) and Claudio Massini (1955), both born in Naples, contemporaries, a history of long friendship, made up of interferences but not influences, between the 1970s and 1980s they shared Lucio Amelio’s gallery in Naples, a veritable centre of the contemporary art world of the time in Italy: on the occasion of this exhibition at Palazzo Collicola, they have therefore recalled each other.
The exhibition itinerary (a double solo show) unfolds along the ten rooms on the ground floor dedicated to temporary exhibitions. Cannavacciuolo and Massini are exhibiting 30 works (including a number of polyptychs) created from the late 1990s to the present day, mostly paintings on canvas, with Cannavacciuolo also exhibiting a large work of ceramic tiles (Sinestesia) as evidence of his openness to other “genres”, while Massini closes the exhibition with a photographic re-proposition of social art interventions carried out between 1974 and 1980, a period of research that oscillates between the anthropological and the popular and that took shape in a collective context such as the intervention carried out in Sant’Antimo in 1977 entitled La notte di Maggio Mellone.
The exhibition attempts to underline the different humoral and narrative aspects of their paths, which in Cannavacciuolo’s case are manifested with a sort of healthy irony, almost didactic, as a tender and ruthless observer who tries to make the spectator reflect through logical and visual traps, in Massini’s case with subtle and precise architectures made of balances, countless layers of colour, small utopias, orientalisms, polyptychs, empire-style recoveries and nostalgia, interweaving of constellations and hedonistic decorations.
Cannavacciuolo’s extravagant and impertinent visual rebuses in works such as Bubbles, Fire Zazazà!, Excelsior, Bored Sea Food vs Barbed Wire Family or Menina do Rio, calor que provoca arrepio are thus a perfect counterpoint to Massini’s dreamlike and frozen spaces in paintings such as Barcellonese, Riparo, Dall’alto e fuori or Architettura fatale, as they both swerve away from the current practice of modernity, tradition and contemporaneity.
Two painters, therefore, who are not marginal but complex and stratified, involuntary antagonists on the contemporary scene from which they stand out for their dense weave of meanings and references, hybridisations and references to other, international cultures and therefore part of a universal culture.
