Fioroni, female leading figure of italian Pop Art, close to Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group, protagonist at Palazzo Franchetti
There are artists who recount the world through images. Then there are artists who, through that same images, can tell what is supposed to be told by words. With the exhibition Giosetta Fioroni. The future comes out of the past. Images and words, hosted in the ACP - Palazzo Franchetti venues in Venice until August 2nd, the roman artist comes back to the city that accompanied her through some fundamental moments of her creative path.
This presence does not mean only a return to exposition spaces but almost a renovated conversation with Venice, the symbol itself of memory. Where time seems to settle between stone, water and tales. It's not a surprise that Venice is exactly the host of a consideration on the connection between memory and image. Few cities live between what has been and what is in constant renovation.
The display project realised by ACP - Palazzo ranchetti by Fondazione Calarota together with Fondazione Goffredo Parise and Giosetta Fioroni, with the support of Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m., returns to the public one of the most original and less explored aspects of the artist's vision, who puts the dialogue between images, words and memories at the center of her research.
NARRATIVE DIMENSION
Among the artists of the latter half of XX century, few could create an imagery as recognisable as the one of Giosetta Fioroni. As the only female figure associated with Scuola di Piazza del Popolo next to preeminent figures such as Schifano, Festa and Angeli, Fioroni kept her own independent voice. Far from simplifications and strict labels. Although she shared elements with Pop Art her vision continued looking into a more intimate perspective. Where personal memory, recollection, childhood and the narrative dimension become instruments for the investigation of reality.
The venetian exhibition choose to focus exactly on one of the less talked but more fascinating points of view of her research: the connection between image and writing. A bond that goes through the entire production of the artist finding in literature not only a cultural reference but an authentic field of creative confrontation.
The itinerary follows the rooms of Palazzo Franchetti library where artist's books, cermics and proof of literary dialogues create an intimate path, that almost feels like home, far away from the spectacularization that often permeates contemporary art. Here the visitor is invited to enter Fioroni's creative laboratory, following the thin thread that connects word and image over the course of half a century of research.
Its not a case that the itinerary of the exposition was born with the help of Fondazione Goffredo Parise. The long human and intellectual fellowship that connected Fioroni with the venetian writer keep representing one of the most significant key of interpretation of her work. It's not irrelevant that this dialogue returns to Venice, deeply present city in Parise's imagery and the writing. In the rooms of the library a constellation of artist's books testifies how the word was never an accessory presence for Fioroni; quite the opposite, it becomes visive substance, narrative structure, important occasion to amplify the significance of the images.
TEXT AND FIGURE
Works like Diario veneto, veneziano, lagunare e ..., Ozio with Goffredo PArise, Fisionomie or Dossier Vado, show how a book can become a space of free creativity where text and image stop belonging to different disciplines. These are not merely publications illustrated. Each page becomes a meeting space, a surface where the graphic sign and the written word chase, complete and, at times, contradict one another.
At a time when we scroll through images absent-mindedly with our thumb,s, Fioroni seems to ask to the visitor to pause. To look and read with equal attention.
The exhibition also shocases the dialogue that Fioroni has built up over time with some of the most significant voices in 20th-century italian literature. From Andrea Zanzotto to Guido Ceronetti, a web of cultural connections emerges, demonstrating how her research has always inhabited a borderland where visual art and writing ceases being autonomous languages to intersecate as parts of a single narrative.
Particularly evocative is the presence of the ceramic works produced at the historic workshop Gatti in Faenza. Here the very concept of book expandes through the space. Pages becomes volumes, the objects take on a sculptural dimension and the reading becomes a physical experience. In this way Ceronetti's poetical texts find a new physicality, hosted withinn structures that invite the viewer to not only observe but almost to walk through the work itself.
ELUSIVE MEMORIES
Even the iconic Argenti works continue to play a fundamental role in the artist's creative journey. With their metallic sheen and their apparent fragility, the Argenti have made Fioroni's artistic language instantly recognisable, becoming some of the most iconic images in italian art of 1960s. These shiny surfaces and nearly suspended in time seem to share the same tension that animates the works displayed today: the attempt is to hold onto fragile images, elusive memories and fragments of existence the would otherwise be destined to dissolve.
Perhaps this is exactly the deepest meaning of the title chosen for the exhibition. The future comes out the past doesn't appear to be a mere poetic statemet, but rather a possible definition of Fioroni's entire artistic career. A journey that continues to look ahead without turning down memory, demonstrating how the contemporary can grow not from the erasure of what has been, but from his continuos reinterpretation.
In an age dominated by the speed of digital images and the instant consumption of content, Giosetta Fioroni's work remind us that looking is a more complex act that simply seeing, it means reading, remembering, imagining. It means let images the needed time to tell a story.
And perhaps, leaving the galleries of Palazzo Franchetti, you realise that the true protagonist of the exhibiton is neither art nor literature alone. It is the very rare in-between space where the two still manage to communicate with one another.