Which deep bond unites an island to its simulacra? And how did the masters of the twentieth century be absorbed and interpreted and interpreted between Mediterranean and South seas?
The exhibition “Islands and idols”, which can be visited until 16 November 2025 inaugurated the summer season of the Man Museum of Nuoro,
It was born to answer these questions and to understand how the symbolic and mythical power of the archaic figures, kept within the boundaries of the insularity, has regenerated, centuries later, in the shapes of the modern.
In the balance between Neolithic and Alba of the twentieth century, between archeology and avant -garde, among the cyclading idols and the wooden sculptures that Gauguin carved in his years of Tahiti, the path flowed between past and present in search of returns, shared feelings, genetic inheritance, effusive pushes intended to resurface in alternate phases, as in geological cycles, and guiding the hands of the authors of Tese a Tese authors to the authors of the authors shape similar shapes. Therefore, not the idea of the traveler who, exploring, finds, absorbs and reply. But the more vital concept that the ancient and the modern touch each other outside the time and space, fortunately nourished by the same necessity: to represent the elsewhere through statues, stems, monoliths that personify the invisible on the ground.
“It is not needed – writes Chiara Gatti in her text – postcolonial revisionism to affirm that, in their hieratic stature, there is nothing primitive, exotic, disturbing. It is pure abstraction. They are goddesses, pitiful and grandiose at the same time, such as Egyptian premies, such as Etruscan bidders, such as agels stolen from Greek vascular painting. And their looks that scrutinize in the void, immersed in a Casoratian waiting, recall the unarmed immobility of Dürer’s mencholia, an allegory of the human intellect that meditates on the fate of the cosmos ».
By critically placing himself as a reflection on today’s concepts of otherness, primitivism and their repercussions in the heart of the postcolonial debate – extended far beyond the history of art – the exhibition sinks into anthropological reasons inherent in the presence of totemic figures in the circumscribers
Perimeters of an island and explains how much masters of the caliber of Gauguin, Beijastein, Miró, Arp or Matisse, during their travels, have reworked this coexistence, projecting their own status icons in the absolute dimension of the sacred.
Starting from the first “escape” of Gauguin towards Brittany, in 1886, according to a concept of island as an ideal place, immune from the derives of the civilized world, the path narrates the experience of Jean Arp, which collected cycladic statuettes, irritated by their magnetism concentrated in a handful, and of Max Beijestin who landed in 1914 in the Palau archipelago, where he lived in contact with the local communities On the island of Angaur and portrayed solemn male faces as a divinity. “I saw the sculpted idols in which a trepid pity and the reverential fear in the face of the impersonable power of nature had imprinted hope, fear and awe, in front of their inevitable destiny”. Joan Miró, in his daily notes, evoked the Moai statues of the Easter island, as a powerful reference for new sculptural forms, recognizing in them the embodiment of an ancestral spirit. And again, Alberto Giacometti who had found his island among the erratic boulders of the Maloja, made every portrait an idol, a custodian of the temple, kneeling in the presence of the immaterial.
Matteo Meschiari writes in his text in the catalog: “The point is to try to understand not so much sociology, philosophy and geopolitics of being and living the island, but how terra-Mare geomorphology contains in itself fossils of mythical thought, how the encounter between rock and water is a kind of morphogenetic field capable of generating myth. The conceptual stereotypes related to the island are a blackout filter: exclusion, separateness, solitude, shipwreck, 
Perrociation, prison, exile, confinement, are only the most widespread, but as soon as we move to ocean -cent cultures such as the Viking or Polynesian one, we realize that the West is dough in a geocentric colonial paradigm that always gives priority to the lands, a continental look that perpetuates a hegemonic geographical model where the sea is emptiness. For those who live in the sea, on the contrary, water is the center of the world, its maps indicate submerged landscapes and motions of currents, while the islands, especially the oceanic ones, are small breaks, suspension areas in salted immensity, and the archipelago is a prickly hyper -ledge held together by the dynamism of the waters, from the full of the sea “.
A selection of over 70 works has archaeological finds arriving from the major museums of Archeology of Sardinia, from the Menhir Museum of Laconi and the Museums of Brittany, in addition to the exceptional loan granted by the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Next to these, the works of the modern masters come from important European collections, including the National Gallery Prague
(for the wooden sculptures of Gauguin), the Modern Art Gallery of Milan, the Musée Départental Maurice Denis, the Museum of the City of Locarno, the Fondation Giacometti and the Archives Henri Matisse, to which are added the Florence Henri archive and Italian private collections such as diffusion Italia International Group Srl and the collection of prints by Enrico Sesana.
Finally, a lunge dedicated to prehistoric Sardinia offers an in -depth analysis of the world of idol in Sardinian land, articulated around four main thematic nuclei: the bull (male symbol associated with the cult of power and
fertility), the mother goddess (female figure linked to the birth and continuity of life), the “upside down” (representation of the afterlife and the ritual reversal), and the anthropomorphic menhir statues, real idols carved in stone and destined to dominate the landscape as eternal presences.
The installation, curated by the architect Giovanni Maria Filindeu, organizes the set of works exhibited in a space form that recalls the configuration of a archipelago made up of small thematic groups. To guide the articulation of the elements, both on the wall and on the floor, are the intentional and critical use of color and the choice of materials. In particular, the Celenit (an aggregate of wood fibers and cement) used for the exhibition bases, in addition to the use of washed sand, natural and evocative binder, whose algid tones marry the summer palette of the plots that draw metaphysical maps.
Carlo Franza