Acappella is pleased to announce ‘Occhio Furbetto’, a group exhibition with works by Roberto Caruso, Michele Cesaratto, David Farcaș, Andrei Pokrovskii, Paolo Pretolani, curated by Leonardo Devito. The exhibition brings together painters from different nationalities and backgrounds, united by a deep bond with the art history. A bond that sometimes shows itself openly, other times in a more nuanced way, but always through an intelligent and calibrated vision. This relationship between contemporary artists and masters of the past recalls Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, an atlas of comparative images that traces the history of references and constants of western art. For an attentive artist, certain images of the past can leave a specific imprint on his imagination and language, unconsciously building a sort of “constellation” of images, references, subjects and beloved details, towards which his painting continuously tends, directly or indirectly. This continuity with a given tradition, however, can reveal a certain fragility or raise questions that it is not wrong to ask. Contemporary art, in fact, has often created a clear break with the past and with what we might define as traditional art. By referring to something that has already been done, isn’t there a risk of being merely rhetorical or of appearing unoriginal? Is it still possible, today, to adhere in some way to an artistic tradition, whether it is close or remote? To answer this question, it is useful to consider what Salvatore Settis writes about traditions: “To approach artistic tradition we must take an opposite path, and etymology alone (tradition from the Latin traditio, which corresponds to the verb tradere, “to pass from hand to hand”) is not enough. We can instead resort to analogy with other uses of tradition, in an institutional sense or in cultural history. In the jargon of philologists, tradition is the mechanism of transmission of texts from one manuscript to another, with inevitable errors and variants. (…) Similarly, the image of Christ offering a scroll to Saint Peter, who can then pass it on to his successors, can be called traditio legis. These passages from hand to hand never imply full identity between the giver and the receiver; indeed, they exclude it (…) in which the need for continuity clashes with the inevitable discontinuity of practices, aspirations or projects, triggering crises or balances that are different each time. Tradition, in short, means inheriting something and taking possession of it to transform it into something else.” [1]
-Leonardo Devito
[1] Settis, Incursioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano 2020, pp.12-13
