Francesco Vezzoli
Curated by Cristiana Perrella and Sergio Risaliti
With two new sculptures in Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio, Francesco Vezzoli is the protagonist of ‘Francesco Vezzoli in Florence’, curated by Cristiana Perrella and Sergio Risaliti.
The project - presented by the Museo Novecento of Florence and by the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci of Prato, realized under the patronage of the Municipality of Florence and the organization of Mus.e - puts into dialogue contemporary art and the historical and artistic heritage of the city.
After the interventions of Jan Fabre, Urs Fisher and Jeff Koons and the presentation of a work by Giuseppe Penone, with Francesco Vezzoli Piazza della Signoria becomes once again the fulcrum of contemporary art in the cradle par excellence of the Renaissance. Francesco Vezzoli is the first living Italian artist to create a site-specific work for Piazza della Signoria, specially conceived for the occasion.
With these works Francesco Vezzoli gives us back new disturbing muses, recomposing the fragments of a lost civilization, reminding us that art is always, first of all, a mental fact and that the ready-made, the ancient-modern assemblage, are a practice with very ancient roots, as Benevenuto Cellini's Ganymede teaches us, made by recomposing parts of an ancient sculpture.
However, with respect to Renaissance restorations, Vezzoli follows the conceptual path of De Chirico and Savinio, inventors of metamorphosis and mysterious collages, and instead of seeking formal harmony, he composes disconcerting hybrids, linguistic collages that regenerate the forms of tradition but which have a life of their own. A surreal world made of archaeology and fantasy, memory and invention, where classical culture, instead of an immutable, timeless model, becomes matter to be broken down and recomposed, to be made current in the present, finding in the hybridization with other themes, other epochs, the cue for artistic - and not ideological - reflection on topics such as identity, authorship, and on how to remember the past, without denying or erasing it. Because freedom is also based on leaving images with their mysterious, poetic and transcendental power.
