The new Camec – Modern and Contemporary Art Center for Spezia opens up to great events. In the spring an exhibition dedicated to two great protagonists of Italian art of the twentieth century. Until September 14, 2025, the new Camec – Modern and Contemporary Art Center for Spezia will host the exhibition Morandi and Fontana. Invisible and infinitededicated to two great interpreters of Italian art of
Novecento, for the first time together in a direct comparison. The works of both artists, in fact, in the past have been the protagonists of important collectives dedicated to avant -garde art in Italy, but had never happened to witness such a direct confrontation. The proposed combination invites the visitor to look at their works with a new eye, not only by focusing on the compositions, geometries, volumes and the harmony of colors, but including the value of the spaces so as to grasp their puzzle. An exhibition that wants to add an unpublished piece to the understanding of Morandi and Fontana, two masters now recognized internationally.
The exhibition, edited by Maria Cristina Bandera, among the major scholars of the art of the twentieth century, curator of the unforgettable anthologies of Morandi at the Metropolitan of New York and Palazzo Reale, and Sergio Risaliti, director of the Novecento Museum of Florence who recently edited Lucio Fontana. The origin du monde And Alberto Giacometti and Lucio Fontana. The search for the absolutepresents about 60 works from prestigious Italian museums, including the Morandi Museum of Bologna, the Gam of Turin and the Mart of Rovereto, and important private collections, as well as by the permanent collection of the Camec Museum of Spezia.
The exhibition itinerary opens with the famous Space concepts of Fontana and accompanies us in an excursus, from the 1950s to the 1960s, which, starting from the famous holes and from the canvases with stones, reaches the period of cuts, the emblematic Expected. The most original invention of Fontana, the piercing the canvas in search of an infinite dimension, moves and turns the way of conceiving art by marking the beginning of a new era. In the same period a different research asks the contemporary world of the time to carry out another leap, aiming for the invisible hidden in the daily world: The dizzying jump is indicated by Giorgio Morandi to whom the next room is dedicated, in which we find a selection of the most significant works of its artistic production, between still lifes and landscapes, starting from the 1920s until the 60s. As kept in a casket, in this room, the famous compositions with bottles, carafe, small jars, coffee makers, tin boxes, will alternate with Grizzana’s landscapes, so dear to Morandi, who tell of a suspended time. Landscapes contemplated in the distance, walls heated by the summer sun, buildings that almost vanish as stolen from our visual perception. Daily and domestic objects, humble and family places, which seem to resist the passage of time, which do not belong to the real world or to that of symbolic language.
The route continues again with Fontana with the famous Theater and one End of Godamong the most admired and refined works of the artist. The last room is dedicated to the designs, watercolors and engravings of Morandi and Fontana, points of departures of their creative evolutions. Some sculptures are also on display, including the famous Nature in bronze and the Nature he is Space concepts in glass, porcelain and brass. An acute and unusual investigation on the relationship between the matter and the invisible essence of things, between contingency and infinity, which unites the two artists, Giorgio Morandi and Lucio Fontana, apparently very distant from each other.
In the still lifes and in the landscapes of Morandi, the repetition of essential subjects, with minimal variations, suspends time in a property. The pictorial matter and color create a rarefied universe, in which space and time expand in the prolonged moment of their appearance. In drawings and watercolors, the sign becomes imperceptible, a visual aphorism. In his tonal painting, which takes on expressive records always new by tending to a progressive stripping, the light is not natural but mental: a constructive principle that shapes space and dissolves the border between full and empty, between reality and abstraction. The objects, deprived of their function, become suspended presences, immersed in a dilated dimension and full of a metaphysical aura.
To this inner research, which digs into reality to transfigure it, the radical action of Fontana is opposed. With his Concepts s
Pazialsthe holes and cuts break the pictorial surface, opening their gaze on the incommensurability of space and time. Artistic practice is reduced to an essential, at the same time elementary and absolute gesture. The matter is no longer represented, but crossed, while the light, penetrating into the slits, transforms the picture into a new dimension, where the void becomes the protagonist. His language is not only a physical investigation of space, but a conceptual and emotional experience, a gap on the unknown.
Despite through opposite languages, Morandi and Fontana guide us beyond the immediate perception of reality, opening their gaze to new possibilities of the absolute and the eternal. In the suspended painting of Morandi and in the fountain cuts an unexpected dialogue is intertwined: the space expands, the weather expands, the infinite emerges. As in a Leopardian echo, their works push to meditate on the finite condition of man, evoking those “infinite spaces and superhuman silences” that lead the mind on the threshold of infinity.
In addition to the exhibition, visitors will be able to discover the new rearrangement of the permanent collection, by Professor Gerhard Wolf, director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max Planck Institut and member of the Academy of Sciences and Letters of Berlin-Brandenburg, inaugurated last October. Over 200 works among those present in the funds of the museum presented in a path that does not clearly follow the usual historical-artistic categories, but opens up to new constellations and free combinations of works, comparing works by Italian and international artists and artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Marina Abramović and many others, without losing the conceptual and chronological orientation that is precisely of each museum setting.
The management of the loans of the works on display was made possible thanks to the collaboration and the fundamental contribution of the Superintendencies of Florence, Bologna, Turin, Siena and Trento.
“The new and not obvious combination of Morandi with Fontana requires looking at his works with a new eye. Not only by focusing on the compositions, the infinite variations, his geometries, the relationships between the volumes, the scalar of the shapes, the harmonies of the colors, the superb tonal outcomes, the scan of lights and shadows, but requires to understand the value of the spaces, so as to grasp its enigma. ‘Landscapes’ that Morandi used to observe through a ‘window’ of a few centimeters, cut out in a cardboard, as if it were an optical viewfinder, with the double purposes -to define and isolate from the context -, or even to investigate with a telescope, close by closer or flowing the shot, as if it were a zoom, allowing the portion of the landscape of its speculations and in the same. Escaping time is valid for the ‘still lifes’, which in the passage of the years are simplified by determining a decrease in the number of objects and a cancellation of the installation plan increasingly coinciding with the back wall up to become empty that insinuates itself between the forms. Above all, it is worth – or, better, it is more perceptible – for watercolors whose images float in an indefinite space. It also applies to drawings, with an abbreviated sign, starting from the second post -war period. A peculiarity of Morandi who was captured by the great masters of cinema. I think above all of Bernardo Bertolucci who in 2012 in a passionate attestation and destined to be collected said: ‘Of course, Morandi is someone for whom you can take a fatal crush, because in Morandi you can see a point – a bit like in a story by Borges, which is called the Aleph, there is a point where you see many things in the world, at the same time, in the paintings of Morandi so apparently, There is always a place, a point from which to spy on the infinite, the infinite also of this poetry so calm, so subdued ‘. “(Maria Cristina Bandera, art historian and curator of the exhibition).
“On other occasions and in the past, the works of Giorgio Morandi and Lucio Fontana found themselves close, but they were important collective exhibitions dedicated to avant -garde art in Italy. He had never happened to attend such a direct confrontation between the two artists. Morandi and Fontana have been addicted in recent decades to magnetic poles for the new generations lost in search of timeless values. Parallel straight, one and the other have directed the gaze to the infinite and the invisible. Morandi did not come out of his study, living art as a sublime mission, in a monacal way, all dedicated to timeless poetry of color and shapes. By harnessing the irreparable and the irrapecarable, Morandi discovered the metaphysical certainty of the eternal between domestic objects and in the landscape, always granting the absolute of pictorial language to the relative feelings and sensations. The infinite of the invisible was dear to him. In Fontana the invisible of the infinity. An exhibition that can add something unpublished to the understanding of Morandi and Fontana in the middle of their international recognition. ” (Sergio Risaliti, curator of the exhibition and director of the Novecento Museum of Florence).
Carlo Franza