The exhibition Ruggero Savinio. Works 1959-2022promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan – Culture, Palazzo Reale and Silvana Editoriale, set up
in the rooms of the Apartment of the Princes of the Royal Palace until September 4, 2022. To be precise, it is Ruggero Savinio, an Italian painter and writer. He is the son of Alberto Savinio (pseudonym of Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico) and the actress Maria Morino, as well as the nephew of Giorgio De Chirico.
Ruggero Savinio (Turin, 22 December 1934) thus returns to Milan with an anthological exhibition that presents to the public some works that are partly unpublished, or that have not been seen for a long time, coming from public and private collections, but also from the deposits of the Museo del Novecento, and that retrace his artistic and biographical history in its entirety. Twenty-three years have passed since 1999, when Milan hosted in the Sala Viscontea of the Sforza Castle a
major exhibition of the artist.
The exhibition, which brings together paintings, drawings and works on paper, begins with Savinio’s formative years between Rome, Paris and especially Milan: the city was the scene of one of his most intense and tormented seasons, when the artist was looking for a place to put down roots and find his own human and artistic identity. The story told in this exhibition – entrusted to a 
group of scholars coordinated by Luca Pietro Nicoletti – is not that of the son of Alberto Savinio and the nephew of Giorgio de Chirico, tutelary deities never denied but all in all distant, echo in the background of this exhibition: it is, instead, the autonomous story of a man who made painting, as he himself wrote in 2008, the «internal melody» of his life. Of the three de Chiricos, in fact, Ruggero is certainly the most “painterly”, who, despite loving literature and bringing its dear and great shadows into his visual imagination, understood that the path, born for him in the 1930s, was to recover that retinal value of painting that dissolves on the canvas, which is all color and matter, through which to reach the heights of an Arcadian imagination, of panic adhesion to nature; to climb the peak of the sublime in the majestic silence of ancient ruins, and finally descend into the domestic quiet of mature, finally serene years. Savinio aims, as he wrote in 2019 in The meaning of paintingto a pictorial “absolute” free from possible other implications, capable of looking at the masters of the past with the freshness of a discovery declined in the present. Not an art that describes, his, but «a sort of abandonment to the vitality of painting».
For this reason, it was chosen to present Savinio as if his paintings were created for the ten rooms of the neoclassical apartment, among moldings, mirrors and velvets, to remember how his research has continually taken into account the ideal Museum of Painting and the great ancient picture galleries. The discovery of those masters, and in particular those of the second half of the 19th century, had occurred in the great European collections, but also thanks to the works visible in the public collections of Milan, where that sensual love for the color that settles on the canvas with a thrill of pleasure was born.
It is an “other” twentieth century, the one to which he belongs, in which a Nordic wind blows calmed by the lights of the Mediterranean, faithful to its own internal reasons and indifferent to the noisiest and most worldly fashions of twentieth-century art. In fact, Savinio has opposed the rhythms of contemporary art consumption with a composed and imperturbable vision of the world, which embraces the twilight of poets. Under the sensitive epidermis of a painting made of small touches, which the artist himself in 1996 defined as a “luminous peripeteia”, and which leads to pleasant and idyllic places, there is in fact a veil of melancholy and restlessness: nostalgia, perhaps, for a lost “golden age”.
The exhibition at Palazzo Reale presents, in five sections, paintings, drawings and works on paper from the early 1960s to the second decade of the 2000s, highlighting the relationship between pictorial research, literary culture and autobiographical memory.
Savinio’s life and imagination, in fact, are dotted with physical and literary places: Milan, the theatre of his youthful beginnings and of his associations with gallery owners and other artists; the holiday homes in Poveromo, Capalbio and Cetona, privileged places of family intimacy; Rome with its parks at sunset and its archaeological ruins; visionary and dreamlike mountain landscapes ready to host the emblematic apparition of flowers or other presences, the setting for Hölderlin on his journey.
In this way, the exhibition, which opens with a room of self-portraits to underline this relationship between painting and biography, intends to bring out the artist’s private mythology – independent of the family artistic history from which he has inherited – to place him in his own time and, above all, to underline the sensuality that characterizes his relationship with painting, which is reflected in numerous pages of his books, his declarations of poetics and the texts dedicated to painter friends and masters of the past.
The exhibition is also of particular interest in the wake of the recent historiographical rediscovery of the 1980s and the so-called “return to painting”, which for Savinio, who has always been faithful to the tools of that expressive language, marks a moment of renewed creative vitality.
Carlo Franza