“I am interested in everything about my time. And if it is about art, creativity and beauty, I simply get lost”. Flavio Caroli , one of the most famous and esteemed Italian art critics and historians, made us fall in love with the great works of the past. In this new volume, I Sette Pilastri dell’Arte di Oggi, which he will present to the public in a Lectio Magistralis , organized by the Lions Club Parma Host on October 3 at 6:00 pm in the Teatro Farnese, he prepares us, instead, for love at first sight with “the genius of the 21st century”, identifying its “pillars”, because “you cannot understand today’s art if you do not know at least its foundations”.
At the origin of the many languages of contemporary art, Caroli identifies seven revolutions that have matured since the years of the Second World War. The adventure can only begin with Action Painting and the canvases of Jackson Pollock – alongside him, the Frenchman Jean Fautrier, founder of Informalism on this side of the Atlantic -, to continue with Pop Art in a “world that escapes in every way from the confines of traditional visual art”. While then photography and figurative painting, two languages that have been fighting each other for more than a century and a half, impose themselves through the shots of Irving Penn and Ugo Mulas, and the paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: everything is already ready for the subsequent revolutions. Environmental Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Body Art, self-harm in London in the Seventies, the pioneer Marina Abramovic’, Abstract Art, Anish Kapoor, “a wonderful bridge between Eastern and Western art”, up to the “anti-Mannerist” Eighties – which always, in different centuries, rather than closing their own time, anticipate the century that is about to begin -, with protagonists, among others, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
Caroli will tell the story of the formation and evolution of these fundamental artistic hubs, will point out their derivations, the legacies that have matured and the projections into the future. Between personal memories, anecdotes and poetic interpretations, accompanied by images of the masterpieces of the last seventy years, I Sette Pilastri dell’Arte di Oggi is a precious viaticum for reading our contemporaneity with the eyes of aesthetics.
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Admission will be free of charge; proceeds will go towards restoration work on works of art in the Pilotta Monumental Complex