Until October 20, 2024, the Mart in Rovereto dedicates to Luigi Serafini an in-depth anthology on the artist’s vast creative activity that involves the fields of architecture, design, painting, sculpture, graphics, photography and digital art. Curated by Andrea Cortellessa, Denis Isaia, Pietro Nocita, Luigi Serafini’s Dream was born from the deep friendship between Vittorio Sgarbi and Luigi
Serafini. The careers of the two have been intertwined since the time of the first edition of the Codex SeraphiniusSerafini’s universal enterprise published in two volumes by a courageous Franco Maria Ricci in 1981 and presented in an exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice the following year. Extravagant and enigmatic, the Codex was immediately considered a masterpiece.We were in front of a miracle that did not fear comparison with the prodigious wonders of the great miniaturists.“, wrote Sgarbi years later, on the occasion of one of the successful reprints of the work.
The exhibition itinerary starts from the Codex Seraphinianus, a fantasy encyclopedia that has been reprinted and edited internationally several times. Over 300 pages written in a non-existent language, asemic writing, and finely illustrated, constitute a fantasy encyclopedia known in intellectual and artistic circles around the world. The book has enthusiastic and illustrious supporters, including Italo Calvino, Federico Zeri, Umberto Eco, Tim Burton, Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Jarre, Orhan Pamuk, Philippe Starck and Fernando Arrabal.
Flora, fauna, architecture, botany and works of the mind, mythological and surreal creatures make up the indecipherable cult book that the artist claims was dictated to him by the cat crouching on his shoulders.
The original plates, made in the Seventies, are now preserved in the Labirinto della Masone in the FMR Foundation (Franco Maria Ricci). The Codex has been published in France, Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands and there is even a “fake” copy published in China. In 2021, the fortieth anniversary of the work was celebrated with a special edition, published by Rizzoli.
Scholars of ancient or dead languages, puzzlers, musicians and even experts in algorithms and artificial intelligence have been studying the Codex for decades in an attempt to solve its mystery. Writings, articles, films and plays have contributed to the popularity of the fantasy encyclopedia that is now frequently featured even in tattoos, songs and Instagram stories. Fun fact: the Codex is currently the fifteenth best-selling artist’s book on Amazon USA and the sixth on Amazon Italy in the art category. In the exhibition produced by the Mart, the Codex is represented with 60 original plates that were included in the first edition, to which are added about forty lesser-known and therefore precious plates, created later and belonging to Serafini himself.
The wide selection introduces the relationship between the artist and the book object, investigated in the exhibition through the plates of two other publications: Pulcinellopaedia Seraphiniana, a fantastic interpretation of the Neapolitan myth of Pulcinella, and Storie naturali, an atlas of imagined botany.
The exhibition illustrates Serafini’s entire production, vast and heterogeneousthrough excellent loans from private collections or from the artist’s own arrangements.
An architect by training, after a long journey Serafini has measured himself with painting, sculpture, graphics, photography, design, illustration and digital art. Pursuing the idea of total art, beyond labels and hierarchies, the volcanic artist has experimented, innovated, turned the canons upside down, succeeding in the singular feat of being constantly highly appreciated and followed, hyper-popular and transversal to different fields, while remaining outside the conventional contexts of contemporary art. The entire creative arc is retraced in the rooms on the second floor of the Rovereto museumhighlighting the audacity in the production of the fantastic image in its possible declinations. From theexperience within the Memphis architecture and design groupup to the artist’s house (now the subject of a legal dispute for its conservation), among paintings, sculptures and installations, the path is a pop universe in which bizarreness and truth, irony and seduction, lightness and surreality coexist and mix. A true author’s project, the installation was also conceived by Serafini, in an exhibition-wunderkammer that is in turn a work of art.
While remaining an exceptional unicum, a crazy organism in which different languages confront and intertwine, the exhibition continues after the first section on the Codex with rooms dedicated to the various disciplines, giving an account of Serafini’s eclectic and imaginative attitude.
It starts with the pictorial production: colorful, pop, utopian, irreverent. Together for the first time in a single gallery are exhibited over twenty large-format canvases.
The sculpture rooms follow, hosting works inspired by some of the themes that have questioned or are questioning society – such as “mad cow disease” or bioethics – and reworkings of classics of fantasy literature or poetry with references to William Blake, Guillaume Apollinaire, Christian Morgenstern, for example.
Also present are numerous installations, controversial works such as the Carrot Woman (Persephone C), goddess-allegory of nature, and a precious exhibition of Disogni, the dream drawings. Most of the works have titles that are linguistic plays: extravagant and ironic, they testify to the artist’s highly original vocabulary.
The route ends with a completely unpublished selection of architectural drawings, experiments and innovations never exhibited, conceived between the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, and of design products, preamble to Serafini’s total work: his famous Casa-studio, a space of life and work for almost forty years and defined by himself as a “small exportable cosmogony” (Vogue Casa, 1986). Owned by the Order of the Knights of Malta, located in the so-called “Roman trident” near the Pantheon and the steps of Piazza di Spagna, the Casa is considered another encyclopedic work. Serafini designed or redesigned not only the functional spaces, the stairs, the rooms, but also the furnishings, the paintings, the objects, the dishes, the furnishings, from the doors to the fireplace, from the windows to the garden. “It is extraordinary precisely in its total autonomy, in its not resembling any other house” (Andrea Bellini, Antinomie, 2023).
The Roman residence has recently been the subject of a 3D video mapping created by the Iuav University of Venice: presented at the Mart, it is the most recent of the many tributes that scholars and intellectuals have dedicated to the artist. Visitors, therefore, have the opportunity to virtually enter the House of Serafini, a true meta-portrait of the artist. An exhibition at the MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, curated by Luca Lo Pinto, is also dedicated to the House until August 25.
Overall, the exhibition Luigi Serafini’s Dreamat the Mart until 20 October 2024, is a fantastic journey into the territories of the unconscious and the imaginaryan amusement park that draws on mythology, a stage from which to observe consumerism, an exhibition that mixes philosophy and semiotics with games and entertainment.
Carlo Franza