Opening time:

Tue 13 > h 19:00 – 20:45
Wed 14 > h 19:00 – 20:45 | h 22:30 – 1:00
Thu  15 > h 19:00 – 20:45 | Meeting / visit with Sergio Risaliti and Alessandro Magini
Fri  16 > h 19:00 – 1:00
Sat 17 > h 19:00 – 20:45
Sun 18 > h 21:00 – 23:00

curated by Sergio Risaliti

After Maurizio Nannucci’s installation NOMOREEXCUSES, Fabbrica Europa welcomes in the central aisle of the Stazione Leopolda a new site-specific project, that is part of a pathway on the leading figures of international art who deal with the extraordinary dimensions of the environment, with works on the interdisciplinary nature of techniques and languages – that of architecture and public space – in tune with the project outlines expressed by the Festival since the the Nineties.

With the installation AttoRitratto. Opera scenica for the first time Marco Bagnoli brings together and presents ten monumental sculptures in the form of hot air balloons. Carried out over three decades, these works have been exhibited in different contexts in Italy and abroad. Extremely light structures in different materials reproducing the (primordial) egg shape of a balloon seen taking off in Holland in 1984, it has since become the symbol of the artist’s journey upwards, both in art and with the inner search for the “good place”.
The Hot Air Balloon therefore becomes a kind of self-portrait in a spiritual sense, where the material body empties in favour of the ethereal one; no longer anchored to the ground, no longer weighed down by matter, it can now free itself of the superfluous to undergo a purifying experience.

Marco Bagnoli has always moved along the double track of art and science, where the artist’s vision fills the scientist’s vacuum, ideologically impeded from metaphysical and transcendental revelations. Art, therefore, as a threshold over which to step for an experience in Beauty that may trigger a desire for further Truth.
Every exhibition of his is a place of shadows and reverberations, blindness and illumination, forces centripetal and centrifugal, where the figures are reproduced parabolically on the walls to testify to the illusion in our perceptions, as if we were in Plato’s cave. Looking at a figure – whether painted, sculpted or projected – means nullifying the image and concentrating inner vision on the non-transient essence of the visible; pushing forward to the extreme limit of beauty, where the intelligible and the perceptible overtake one another.

Step by step it comes about that space and time categories lose their sense; the same thing happens to finite and infinite, or to past, present and future. The gaze rises high up into the void thanks to an exercise of asceticism that cannot stop contemplating beauty, indeed it is aware of its essential reason, the fact that the beautiful appearance of created things is the tool and vector to rise towards Truth.

Bagnoli frequently quotes Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In philosophical texts from the late fifteenth century he finds words to express his artistic vision, going beyond science thanks to transcendental intuition and “love of beauty”, the need for religious syncretism on which to found a world with no more conflicts and desperation. As Eugenio Garin said: “True philosophy is to surprise the mysterious depths of being, to pluck its secret, and through knowledge that is beyond scientific learning, achieve an understanding of the ultimate meaning of life, thus freeing Man from the horror of his mortal condition”. His works are the gates through which to reach a dimension of reality, language and technique that is not ephemeral.
“Bagnoli – writes Fulvio Salvadori – recognized that what is not art is co-natural with art, that art already contains in itself that gap in vision that frees it from common sense. The prospect is no longer within the work, but calls upon the inner spectator, the only one who can confer it with unity, removing it from the fragmentation of the gaze, although the gaze is his. The overturning that is the outcome brings to the fore the outlook to infinity, definable as one and unachievable”.
Sergio Risaliti

For years Marco Bagnoli has been present at great international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale (1982, 1993, 1997) and Documenta at Kassel (1982 and 1992). From the mid-Seventies to the present, he has taken part in collective exhibitions in Italy and abroad (X Biennale de Paris, Arte e Critica, Identité Italienne, The European Iceberg, Promenades, Ouverture, Soonsbeek, East meets West, Europa oggi, Periodi di Marmo, Minimalia, Belvedere dell’Arte). Great museums, such as the Contemporary of Geneva, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, the IVAM in Valencia, the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Quarter-Centro d’Arte Contemporanea in Florence, have organized his personal shows.
The artist has followed a very personal pathway, ahead of the times, carrying out site-specific installations in places of exceptional value, artistic and architectural, religious and spiritual. For example, the Cappella dei Pazzi in Florence, the Villa Medicea dei Cento Camini in Artimino, the Octagonal Hall in the Fortezza da Basso, the Limonaia grande in the Boboli Gardens of Florence, the Church of San Miniato al Monte, the halls of the Palazzo Pubblico di Siena. His works are to be found in important international collections and his permanent installations have been commissioned by public institutions and private art patrons.

We thank the Banca Del Vecchio for its support.

[photo: Ilaria Costanzo]