CROSSING

From Klimt to Basilè, from Sironi to Bauermeister12 October 2023 - 18 January 2024

​​The project is curated by Ilaria Bignotti and returns to the public a careful and rigorous selection of Heritage works, both of recent acquisition and historic, highlights unprecedented relationships between even distant languages, whose forms and visions, however, always echo the fundamental and founding values of the company: it crosses the atlantes of the history of art, it retraces a ten-year history of experimentation and dialogues, it does not pretend to be complete or organic – the Heritage works derive from a previous history of various collections and acquisitions, the recently produced works added to the collections are intended to tell the story of the current art scene by embodying the company’s values – but it has the enthusiasm of being a potentially open, dynamic, even critically diverse exhibition.

The exhibition itinerary is thematic: Experimentation, Empathy, Engagement, Protection, Sharing, Change, Vision, sections whose themes can, of course, make us recognise not only the founding principles of CUBO, but also, above all, the values that are universal and shared in civilised societies, values that artists have been able to transmitdown to us throughout the centuries of art history; values of which the paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations on show today are mercurial messengers.

A transcendent aura stands out in the retablo by Ettore Frani from 2012, which right from its title, Terra Latte Luce III [Earth Milk Light III], evokes meditation that can give rise to a vision and invites contemplation of a painting that is attentive and revealing of itself and its profound desire to transcend the physical boundaries of the subject-work; in a certain sense, the frame of Giacomo Costa’s video, Tim(e)scape n. 15 of 2019, suggests that time is frozen and as if distilled in a metaphysical landscape: the concept of Mutations, which is intertwined with that of impermanence as a way of thinking of the future as continuous, dynamic transformation, is in a way associated with that of Vision. 

Ettore Frani, Terra Latte Luce III, 2012, oil on panel, 92×185 cm (open retable)​​

Giacomo Costa, timescape 16 (frame155), 2019, videobox​

​It would then be enough to observe the dreamy and suspended atmosphere of Matteo Basilè’s diptych, Landing Francesca, from 2012, in dialogue with the light and elegant pencil sketch that gives shape to the Seated Woman from the early twentieth century by the master of symbolism, Gustav Klimt. Two artists who are attentive, almost maniacal, in attempting to translate through the media of their era, the movements of the soul, both fascinated by a dark side that becomes a feeling of upset, a voluptuous and persuasive form, a chromatic scale that sparkles and blackens.

Movements of the soul that seem to be crystallised in the suspended sheets and in the amazement that hovers between the girl’s gestures in the fairy-tale image by Tania Brassesco & Lazlo Passi Norberto, entitled Fairy book (from the Fairy Tales Now cycle, 2011), or reveal themselves as a sacred dialogue in the Apparition of the Virgin and Child to St. Philip by Ignazio Stern, XVII-XVIII century.

Ignatius Stern, Apparizione Vergine col bambino a San Filippo​ ​​(Apparition of the Virgin and Child to St. Philip), 17th-18th century, oil on canvas, 121.5×161.5 cm

Tania Brassesco & Lazlo Passi Norberto, Fairy book (from the series Fairy Tales Now), 2014, lambda print on dibond, ed. 17, 70×140​ cm

​This is the meaning of the atlas of images that the CUBO Corporate Museum is mapping today, for which this volume acts as a nautical chart.

(extract from the catalogue text by Ilaria Bignotti)​