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Alberto Magnelli accomplished about a few dozens of collages over
a period of time that lasted about thirty years. The first ones
date back to the Thirties and characterise the great abstract season
of his artistic maturity until the Sixties.
The modern “invention” of the collage technique belongs for sure
to the historic avant-gardes, and particularly to the Cubist movement.
Both for scoffing purposes or as an extension of their formal
outcomes, artists try to find a solution to the eternal contrast
art/life, introducing into their works discarded materials from
everyday life (initially these “every day places” were the cafés
and the atelier of the artists themselves). In a period of about
a century the collage technique, together with the assemblage one
(the two techniques being strictly closed one to the other) are
going to keep, and perhaps to strengthen, their essentially
social, politic and narrative (obviously of a non-linear narration)
connotation relying each time to key words like “ibridation”,
“fragmentation”, and “appropriation”. Though, Alberto Magnelli’s
collages are completely outside this tradition which we could
define a consolidated 19th century and contemporary tradition.
And this may be enough, perhaps, to make them rare and original.
In opposition to the Cubist and the Dadaist collages, which were
based on discarded materials, Magnelli’s collages are deliberately
and consciously made up with industrial materials: one time it is
rough paper, other times are corrugated paper, oilpaper, linen paper
or tarred paper, wallpaper or music paper, or still packing
cardboard, sackcloth or rope, in any case materials accurately
selected with an eye always to their formal aspect. In opposition
to the historical avant-gardes, then, which had focussed on the
collage essentially realized by collecting objects and materials
“found”, prosaic and worn out, Magnelli employs the industrial
materials of his time according to extremely personal and sophisticated
ways, aiming to enrich the expressive potentialities of the pictorial matter.
A little more than twenty years ago, in an essay he wrote on Magnelli’s
collages, Giulio Carlo Argan argued: “Severe experimentation or refined
irony on the contradictions of the pictorial art in the industrial era?
But which is the difference?”. In this (rhetorical) question is enclosed
the meaning of Alberto Magnelli’s collage technique, which is based on
the one side on a continuous formal search, completely assimilable to
the language of painting, on the other side on a critic – but not conceptual
– meditation on the meaning of painting in the industrial era.
The exhibition “Alberto Magnelli. Collages” offers a selection of 29
historical collages, from 1936 to 1964, some of which already exhibited
in the personal show at the Centre Pompidou in 1989 and in the Italian
exhibition of 2006 (held in Reggio Emilia and Correggio); some others,
on the contrary, are completely new for the public. According to the
opinion of the artist himself on the necessity of a “formal coherence”
in art, the corpus of the collages exposed gives a rigorous vision of
his work of experimentation, always played on an homogeneous range of
materials and geometries, with the only extraordinary exception of the
Collage n. 820, 1938, where on the corrugated fibreboard and the wood
of the background are present leaves, branches, glass and terracotta
fragments, the only one allowance to a lost “naturalism”.
The exhibition, edited by Daniel Abadie and Danna Battaglia Olgiati,
is supported by a catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale with
texts by Ada Masoero and Giovanni Iovane.
The review is sponsored by the prestigious contribution of: Martin
Maurel Sella – Banque Privée (Monaco), MPM & Partners (Monaco),
Audemars Piguet Le Maître de l’Horlogerie depuis 1875, and Kogan Financial Art.
Supported by the town and the province of Milan
Milan, march 2008
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