During my Italy trip I stayed in Barga in Tuscany; there they had a lot of lovely little galleries, the most interesting of which was actually part of a very old house. As I walked through past the classic oil paintings I suddenly stumbled into a room where an elderly lady was sat listening to jazz on the radio, seemingly completely unaware of my presence. Beyond her was a grand piano, a libraries worth of books and the studio within which the artist worked and then the exhibition continued. The space was light and airy and the worked was displayed around interesting features of the house including an old kitchen sink. This place was called Casa Cordati and holds the work of Bruno Cordati, a local artist who passed away in 1979. His work is still celebrated and admired by Barga and its visiters.
This place was one of the most amazing exhibition spaces I have seen. The building was grand but not intimidating and had a quality of being discovered rather than imposed. It would definitely be the sort of place I would like to display my own work.
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so what is stopping you from doing just that ...and exhibiting your work there ?
ReplyDeleteBack in 2003 I was invited by the Casa Cordati to make some work based around the paintings of Bruno Cordati.
As Frank Viviano says “The conventional wisdom is that Cordati’s most important statements were made before and during his Balkan sojourn, in portraits and character studies that ignored the abstract mode of his contemporaries in favour of a psychologically intense realism
After spending time with his paintings however, I came to think that Cordati’s decisive journey as an artist began after his return to Italy and continued unabated to his death in 1979
He painted over his own earlier work, searching for new meaning in composition and structure, a new language to describe the world as he had seen and experienced it.”.
A story recounted by his daughter Bruna*, once entered my head, refused to leave. That of her distinct memory of two men working in the studio in front of two easels: one was her father painting, the other his friend Paolo, who was cancelling old canvases and preparing them to be used once again.
I decided to base my work around the paintings done in Cordati’s “difficult” late period to see if I could find some signs along the way to help me understand them a little clearer. The more I looked, the more I found..
The gift of a dozen “virgin” canvases that Cordati had prepared but not used and the discovery of some of Cordati’s older canvases that had been sanded over, the images half destroyed and prepared for further painting added spice to the whole experiment
this exhibition can be seen here;
http://www.barganews.com/keane/signs/
*this was the elderly lady listening to jazz on the radio by the way