The first edition of Arte all'Arte, curated by Laura Cherubini, explored reality, perception and energy, using essential forms and spatial relationships to challenge time and matter. Getulio Alviani in Siena explored dynamism and visual perception, where the interaction between work and viewer is constantly evolving. In San Gimignano, Giovanni Anselmo integrated energy, matter and processes through concrete and radical works. The art of Luigi Ontani, between myth, identity and transformation, was the protagonist in Montalcino and Michelangelo Pistoletto used the mirror to fuse self-portrait, spectator and infinity within the walls of Volterra. This edition was an experience to reveal the conventions of the visible by mixing tradition and culture - personal and collective - between the ancient and the contemporary.
Edited by Laura Cherubini
"The realisation of the first works seems almost a miracle, and they are beautiful. Ontani in Montalcino works as usual on the vocation of the place where wine is the most typical product. At the beginning, Ontani had also thought of involving the poet Valentino Zeichen (for whom he coined the title "Valentino, sex and wine"), accompanied by a chorus of children's voices in songs about wine, but then the collaboration was limited to a few verses in the catalogue. Anselmo's sparse work is made up of a few simple elements, but a great current of energy, the vital principle of matter, passes between them. The work is composed of a pair of stones towards an attempt at flight. Alviani works in Siena and dedicates the work to the Palio, but, as a protagonist of cinevisual art, he is not interested in horses and jockeys, but in the visual apparatus around them: flags, marbles, cockades, coats of arms with the colours of the contrade that lend themselves to a thousand optical games for opaliop, an optical Palio generated by a series of mirror images. And how angry Get was when he heard from the 'boys' that the Priors and the Palio regulations did not allow the use of the original material! It took all of Anna's patience to calm him down! But he was so relaxed that in the now famous Arte all'Arte bus, he sang "Abat-jour"... Pistoletto designed for the Pinacoteca di Volterra, a sequence of five trunks: the first was split in half and covered on the inside with a mirror wall. The second was cut at 90°, with 2 mirrors doubling each other due to the phenomenon of refraction, the more the angle of the cut narrows, the more the mirror multiplies, until finally the trunk rejoins and we can only imagine the infinite refraction inside. By a strange coincidence, a sequence of five trees appears in the exhibition invitation, taken from a work by Beato Angelico, the artist who captured the analogy between nature and culture, between a tree and a human body. Of these secret coincidences is made the spirit of Arte all'Arte, which tends to reconstruct a fabric between artists and cities, to reknit the threads with the artistic tradition of the past in view of the present.
"Laura Cherubini, from the Arte all'Arte X catalogue, 2005
"Every work of art is a child of its time but expresses in itself something that goes beyond time. This is certainly what the friends of the Arte Continua cultural association thought when they decided to propose to the attention of four historic Tuscan municipalities, Volterra, San Gimignano, Siena, and Montalcino, the product of the creativity of famous contemporary artists in spaces within which the history of the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance can be breathed.
A daring event? Not so much, if you consider that art, the real kind, is recognised for its universal language that allows epochs and people far apart in time and space to find themselves close and understand each other.
On the contrary, it is precisely the comparison between works that do not belong to the same period that allows us to develop a reflection on the path that man has taken throughout history, varying yes, expressive techniques, always manifesting new sensitivities, but in the end always remaining the same commitment to seek out and produce what an illustrious and anonymous person from the classical era defined as the sublime."
Renato Bacci, Councillor for Culture in Volterra, from Arte All'Arte I
