Lighting cigarettes to ghosts
The exhibition moves around the artist’s most recent, wide-ranging and layered cycle of oils on paper, punctuated by two intense and colloquial collections, Apples and Agaves, small formats that smell on the surface of Novecentist instances and sink slowly into the archetypes of painting. The narrative is finally completed in the play of windows and breakthroughs in the last room, a Chinese-box relationship with a nucleus of works painted around the 1970s by the artist’s mother, the painter Laura Natangelo, on a lyrical route from Casorati to a harsh, Mediterranean expressionist matrix. A relationship this, which is configured as a dimension in which alternative presents collide on the walls.
Inheritance is a central theme here, and not only in the oblique relationship with pictorial matter, a familiar and everyday affair for the two artists. In the text accompanying the reading of the works – borrowing some lines signed in 1969 by the poet Adriano Spatola – Federico Lupo in fact writes: “For the poet [the painter] inheritance is a matter of course. […] He feels compelled to assume at all costs the role of manipulator of the ghost,” thus determines the triggering of the image as an opaque system of transmitting spectral information, exploring the combinatorial possibilities of matter. Legacy is in this narrative an exhausted organism, an organism to be assembled and disassembled by sweeping the logical structure underlying language under the rug.
The title of the exhibition alludes to the possibility of still performing everyday actions for two, burning cigarettes to the sky and beguiling time. Lighting cigarettes to painter friends on a confidential journey, from Cézanne to Fiume, Gauguin to Sironi.
Memory is foreign, painting happens when the painter no longer remembers anything about himself and allows himself to pass through.
Admission: Free of charge. Tours by reservation.
For info www.marthapalermo.it by writing to info@marthapalermo.it or on whatsapp +393331008512.
