Alongside the exhibition Monet: The Time of the Water Lilies, the courtyard of the Palazzo Reale hosts a unique work by Milanese artist Alessandro Papetti, consisting of three large circular pictorial spaces, each 8 meters in diameter.
This initiative, spearheaded by the City of Milan's Department of Culture and realized in collaboration with the Palazzo Reale and Italian Factory, marks the start of a project designed to foster a dialogue between art of different time periods through the sensibility of a contemporary artist. In that case, Papetti's exhibition engages in an ideal dialogue with Monet: The Time of the Water Lilies, on display on the first floor of the Palazzo Reale.
"Let us imagine time and immerse ourselves in it. Time is like a circle of which we are merely a moving point. Yet this circle envelops us, taking on the shape - and perhaps the strength- of a spiral," explains Massimiliano Finazzer Flory, the City of Milan's Councillor for Culture. "We find ourselves absorbed by color. The fusion of the historical, the modern, and the contemporary - which defines Milan's new cultural direction - continues."
The installation is made of three huge circular "pictorial environments" (each with an inner diameter of 8 meters) that visitors can enter, physically immersing themselves in the painted space and allowing themselves to be swept away by the expressive power of colors and lines, as if they became an integral part of the paintings.
In this way, the distance between viewer and artwork seems almost to dissolve amidst a kaleidoscopic interplay of mirrors, quotations and cross-references, enabling visitors to instinctively reconnect the severed links between the great tradition of modern European painting - of which Monet's expressive power represents a pinnacle-and the avant-garde movements of the early and late 20th century. Particularly in light of the numerous experiments exploring the complex relationship between the artwork and the habitable space - or between the exterior landscape and the interior (ranging from Fontana's spatial environments and Land Art expressions to Richard Serra's labyrinths) - this new work by the Milanese artist emerges as an ideal reinterpretation, even as it employs the techniques of the finest pictorial tradition. "The idea for this cycle of circular paintings," explains Alessandro Papetti, "came to me a few years ago from a specific need: to rethink and deepen not only my artistic research but also my position and my link to the painting itself. It was about challenging the certainties of routine practice, as well as the habit of working within a defined pictorial space or a standard approach to the canvas. From this arose a desire to place myself in a less conventional situation - while remaining within the medium - in a space where the boundaries could expand, making me feel as though I were at the center of a distinct and unusual spatiotemporal experience. A circular space as a different kind of pictorial space - an alternative to the traditional space - where, conceptually at least, there is neither beginning nor end, and where the act of painting can represent both the start and the finish. Not knowing where to begin or which direction to take becomes a possibility. It is about turning inward within the circle, no longer standing outside the canvas."
The three large-scale works on display - which Alessandro Papetti spent over a year creating - are presented within a vast tensile structure (materializing a concept the artist had been developing for a decade) and explore three distinct themes: water, air and the forest.
The theme of water - which prompted the pairing with the exhibition Monet: The Water Lily Era - follows on naturally from the series the artist began in 1998, featuring paintings centered on the concept of the nocturnal bath and the vast, evocative pools he has exhibited on numerous occasions. In these canvases, water - whether by night or by day - serves as a means of detachment, propelling the viewer into a dimension that seems to transcend reality, entering instead the realms of the unconscious and memory, fear and inner darkness. Similarly, the recurring sequence of tree trunks in the forest-inspired works appears to break with the naturalistic conventions of traditional landscape painting, while in works inspired by the theme of air, the painterly gesture itself - with its dynamic force and vibrant energy - seems to become the true protagonist of the piece.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring a text by Achille Bonito Oliva.
