The Work of Franco Guerzoni at the Museo del 900

An itinerary winds along old walls marred by cracks, scrapes and swellings that evoke, like a well-planned schedule, the events around which the sophisticated personal archeology of Franco Guerzoni was formed. The images, both authentic and simulated ruins, wisely rebuilt with the language of painting, dialogue with the works from the early Seventies, born out of the collaboration with photographers Luigi Ghirri and Franco Vaccari. The exhibition Franco Guerzoni. L’Immagine Sottratta re-opens the season of exhibitions at the Museo del Novecento, exploring the languages utilised by the artist from Modena. The exhibition, which pre-announces itself as being intimate, “intimate like the space which hosts it at the Museo del Novecento, with the grand Hall of the Lanterna and the Archive space,” will seek, as the artist explains, “to accept the fragmented nature of numerous phases of the work, seeking to meet one another across a significant temporal distance”. The event in Milan will also be an occasion to present small, never-before-seen plaster works entitled Intravedere, which make observers out of mere spectators, guiding their movement to allow them to unlock enigmas within the work. They float like open books, but their images are out of the view of the observer. “Shy and smiling” is the space dedicated to papers, documents and photos that help describe the origins of works, giving life, from euphoria to defeat, to the Unresolved. Then there are the “book-works” or “libri-opera” - from the Libro dei Sogni of 1970 to the Museo Ideale of 2014 - books “to act out” rather than contemplate, nourished by reflections of poets, critics and scholars, friends of the artist.