Franco Guerzoni – The stolen image

The Museo del Novecento in Milan, in an environment that Guerzoni himself defined as “intimate” and which includes the Lantern Room and the Archives room, hosts an exhibition dedicated to the Modenese artist (born 1948). Curated by Martina Corgnati, the exhibition focuses on the “fragmentary character of some research seasons”, significant pieces meeting in a dialogue of meaningful correspondences, between painting, matter and photography.

We can admire the works created by the artist in the last decade, a journey around the theme of the “wall”, old, precarious, peeling and dusty walls, furrowed by scratches, moulds, cracks and saltpetre: at the beginning, of photographic shots used as a support and then represented on canvas. Real ruins or more frequently simulated and suggestively reconstructed, the images interact with works of the early 1970s, born from the collaboration with his friends Luigi Ghirri and Franco Vaccari, both photographers, in a period of artistic experimentation very close to photography. A showcase shows a labyrinth of photographic sequences, often unreleased, that the author called Irrisolti (Unresolved), and that recall the early stages of his artistic research. Intravedere (Glimpse), on the other hand, is the last chapter of this search: small rooms of chalky material whose image is hidden, precisely “stolen” from the observer’s gaze.