The exhibition ” Gianfranco Baruchello. Possible worlds“(January 25-May 3, 2025) presents a series of works by Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023) in the internal and external spaces of the Villa Farnesina. The exhibition project, conceived in conjunction with the International Conference of Studies on the Opera
of the artist who was held on 23 and 24 January 2025 at the Accademia dei Lincei, edited by Carla Subrizi, in collaboration with the Baruchello Foundation, crosses some rooms of the Villa Farnesina by proposing a distance dialogue between history, iconographies and imaginary belonging to different eras.
Gianfranco Baruchello with his radical and independent work, which has crossed seven decades between the 20th and twentieth centuries, has often stated that all his work has been the attempt to build “small systems” capable of contrasting the great systems of history, of the politics and ideology. Among the most significant and important artist in the panorama of Italian and international art of the Second World War, he has crossed the main trends of the art of the twentieth century with independence.
The story, the unconscious, the dream and the environment, themes all present in the cycles of the frescoes of the Villa Farnesina, have been continuously investigated by Baruchello and return to this exhibition through a multiplicity of different averages, including painting, the object, the installation, the moving image. So what happens if a work by Baruchello finds himself dialogue with a work by Raffaello? If the Nymph Galatea, present in the frescoes of the homonymous loggia, finds the journey of a river before him (the river, 1982-1983) designed by an artist who lived 500 years later, as a tortuous path, full of obstacles? If Raffaello thinks Galatea through the metamorphosis of Ovid, Baruchello identifies himself during a river that in his articulation, discovers the difficulty in flowing, in being what he should, due to alterations of the natural (environmental, geographical, social) balances) both of the experience lived. Politics and poetic thus come to reconcile themselves for
Telling the story of a crucial, very current question, and who questions humanity all about the already done and on the possible interventions necessary to undertake. Will rivers continue or will arrest themselves in a mouth full of obstacles and impediments, as in Baruchello’s work? The work, with a new set -up, develops in parallel on the long side of the Galatea loggia.
The other works of the exhibition also dialogue with the rooms of Villa Farnesina. Nomad and fragile houses (a house in wire iron, 1975 in the frieze room); Monuments to the non -heroes or to those who have been forgotten by history (the monument to the non -heroes, 1962, in the wedding room of Alexander the Great and Roxane); both temporal and spatial stratifications of the complexity of the pictorial cycles of the villa caught in the reduced extent of a not large space (Oh, Rocky Mountains Columbine, 1966 in the Pompeiana room); looks that continue to look at us and ask ourselves in a photographic assembly (the story looks at us, 1972-2018); Operable heads that show the unconscious, the memory and territories of the psyche still to be explored (the Murmur series, 2015 in the loggia of love and psyche) a garden in the historic park of the villa (Giftpflanzen, Gefahr! (poisonous plants, danger!), 2009) of very beautiful and seductive plants, which prove to be able to constitute a danger; A sculpture that shows the cartography of an intimate and sensitive territory in room 5 of the Villa Farnesina, where the walls are in restoration to re -emerge the pictorial stratifications (ideal relief, 1965).
The exhibition therefore crosses the experience of the story, its story, in a dialogue between distant ways of seeing and perceiving the same subjects: the house and architecture, the psyche, the river and the landscape, the geography, the history and its protagonists.
THE Possible worlds They are configured when time loses its articulation: the sequences stop, the past returns to act in the contemporary and the present is realized as a foray into the already state.
In this exhibition, the gaze on the past, towards a work or an experience of this, is a look that investigates and that tries to observe what had not yet been seen.
Carlo Franza