curated by Barbara Codogno
Galleria Civica d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Piazza Indipendenza, 13, 30027 San Donà di Piave VE
Anthology of Equal Days. Solo exhibition by Ruggero D’Autilia.
“The new exhibition project was born during the pandemic period and moves within the artistic phenomenon
defined internationally as “appropriation art”, one of the most typical expressions of
postmodern culture.”
The solo exhibition of artist Ruggero D’Autilia entitled “Anthology of Equal Days” opens on September 16 at 6:00 PM. The exhibition, curated by Barbara Codogno, will be held until October 8, 2023 in the spaces of the Galleria Civica d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea of San Donà di Piave, Venezia. The exhibition will be held until October 8, 2023 in the spaces of the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of San Donà di Piave, Venezia.
On display are about forty works created by the author mostly during the lockdown that occurred during the last pandemic. D’Autilia explains: “My new exhibition project was born during the pandemic period and moves within the artistic phenomenon defined internationally as “appropriation art“, one of the most typical expressions of postmodern culture. In this view of things, the artist, considering the myth of the Avant-garde to be overcome and abandoning the conviction of a linear historical progress, measures himself against the entire heritage of artistic tradition, without any further diachronic or hierarchical distinctions. This is the case for most of the works included in the current project, a series created looking at the masters of the 18th century in Europe, in particular Pietro Antonio Rotari, Fragonard, and Watteau, so-called painters of lightness and the ephemeral. The apparently frivolous images invite a closer reading and in a different key: one sees emerging, in fact, a restlessness, a feeling of “party over” or even a widespread threat, it is the unexpected that bursts in. A world of grace, intimacy, seduction and malice is threatened by the looming, to remind us that beauty and happiness are not lasting.”
In her critical text, accompanying the catalog, Barbara Codogno emphasizes: “The works presented here by D’Autilia were created during the lockdown due to the spread of Covid; subsequently, on some of these, the author intervened by inserting tears and pained expressions: a reflection on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. In many of these works, in short, one traces that fil noir that transposes onto the canvas the fears set in motion by the violent contagion. The exhibition indeed opens with a pictorial reworking from Bernardino Mei, “Ghismunda with the Heart of Guiscardo”, an episode in turn taken from a novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron, written at the time of the Black Death, of which we can trace an evocative-narrative origin in “Convivio” – where some mice feast among abandoned nuts and jewels. The mouse is the beginning: it is the beast that circulates evil. The violence of the contagion is never explicit in D’Autilia, on the contrary, it always acts below the surface, insinuating itself as a disorienting element. The author, thanks to the scenic framework and expressive and stylistic talent, exercises a continuous semantic friction that connects vanitas to the grotesque, leaving us a bitter aftertaste: the presentiment of an imminent catastrophe.”
Completing the exhibition are 69 cabochon miniatures, one for each day of lockdown, executed in oil on various metals with varying sizes ranging from a diameter of 20 mm to a maximum of 40×30 mm, with subjects of the most varied, reworkings of details or personal inventions.
Codogno writes on this subject: “These miniatures ideally connect to ex voto offerings: they are, in short, a perfect post-pandemic exorcism. They are “ex voto suscepto”, which means “according to the promise made”. The promise is the return to order. These votive depictions constitute a gigantic theatricalization of suffering.”
