PAOLO CONTI. CATALOG REASONED I | GALV 1969-1973

PRESENTATION at Mart in Rovereto
Thursday 12 October at 17.30

Professor Renato Barilli will discuss it with the artist and the director of the Mart Gianfranco Maraniello

FLAMES 12 October 2017 pm 17.30 the PAOLO CONTI volume will be presented at the Mart museum in Rovereto. CATALOG REASONED I | GALV 1969-1973. Prof. will discuss it together with the artist. Renato Barilli and the director of the Mart Gianfranco Maraniello.

The volume, edited by the Conti Archive and published by Vanillaedizioni, collects all the works belonging to the GALV cycle and created by the artist between 1969 and the 1973. In slight contrast to a traditional general catalogue, characterized by a mass of black and white images that are not always intelligible, the editorial choice was oriented towards greater readability of the artist's path, with large images compatible with the heterogeneous quality of the material that the Archive has managed to find. Overall they are 349 the tables, between color and b/w, with the relevant cards.

From a critical point of view, Catalog Ragionato I contains essays by Valerio Dehò and Giovanni Granzotto and, in a historical perspective, the essays by Marcello Azzolini (1971) and Renato Barilli (1972), as well as a critical biographical account of L. Conti.

All the works in the Galv cycle are made of steel, subjected to various treatments, like galvanizing (also iridescent), nickel plating and fired paint. The GALVs represent the artist's first response to the relationship between entropy and art. For Conti, artistic research is precisely the ability to oppose disorder, incessantly creating new languages.
The artist's first major solo exhibition, in 1971 at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, it was dedicated to the Galvs. The following year Renato Barilli wrote, on the occasion of the exhibition at the La Loggia Gallery in Bologna:

“It would be an unforgivable mistake to include these works by Paolo Conti within the scope of the poetics of scrap, already very widespread in the times of informality and new realism: the poetic one which consisted of a smug display of twisted and rusty sheets. A quick reconnaissance instead leads us to see that the various metal elements used by Conti are shiny, clean, as if they had just left the factory. And so it is indeed: these are the waste products that accumulate at the feet of the large cutting machines intended to "print" the pieces of many gadgets and tools. But the controversial notion in this case is precisely that of waste: I discard because, and based on what criteria? In reality only an astute eye can distinguish at first glance which of the two pieces, exited in a single delivery from the cutting machine, be the good one, and which one is wrong; taken for themselves, they both appear clear, rigorous, based on a beautiful combinatorial game of geometric profiles. Conti's right intuition was then to understand that only extrinsic reasons could lead to a distinction and a subsequent discard, between those sister products; the "positive" piece becomes positive only by keeping in mind a tool logic, very different from the aesthetic one; removed this, there is a fascination with the "negative", indeed one could say that it is all the more captivating, the more free and available […].
Conti chooses his home in the kingdom of shadows, in the vast negative band that surrounds the narrow perimeter of the useful pieces on all sides, which little by little will be domesticated and reduced to the very modest, banal forms of domestic contraptions. While the shadows, for their part, they can endlessly improvise the ballets of the possible, not without giving us the illusory sensation of being able to recognize and "read" them, as always happens with shadows […]”.

Among the indefinite reflections of these works, whose rigor is sometimes only granted to the wear and tear of time, a world of redemption emerges (and the often sarcastic titles prove it), in which stubborn optimism is the engine of research.

Mart of Rovereto
Bettini Course 43 | Rovereto (TN)
info@mart.trento.it
www.mart.tn.it

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