Io Non Sono Leggenda, Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo di Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia

Title

Io Non Sono Leggenda, Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo di Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia

Curation

Curated by Davide Dall'ombra

Year

2020

Works

The Island of Dr. Mastrovito Johnny In Order of Appearance Andrea si è perso Sant'Ippolito I Am Not Legend NYsferatu - Symphony of a Century

Featured in

Arte Mondadori_October 2020

Artribune, 20/09/2020

Notes

"AN EXHIBITION

[The appropriation of reality] was the starting point from which to bring about the exhibition illustrated in these pages, staged at the Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo in Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, over the last trimester of 2020, around the time when the work I Am Not Legend was donated to the Museum, being awarded a location in a room of its own as part of the permanent collection. T he work, featured on the first floor in the large central room, came into close relationship with Scultura d’ombra, the work on the walls by Claudio Parmiggiani (2007), thanks to the decision to screen the film on a large wall of books erected especially for the space. Parmiggiani’s permanent intervention is one of his famous bookshelf casts, created using smoke, which leaves nothing more than a white outline of the books themselves: an enormous inverted-polarity X-ray sheet which, in Mastrovito’s work, finds a further element of table-turning, given that books here are preponderantly present, albeit forced to respect the dictatorship of their indistinct and anony mous rows. Here too the covers are concealed, but the impression is that their presence has not lessened, nor has their disruptive force, just like the zombies in the film: cancelled yet still fero cious, and who – not by chance – in their shining white presence, when they appear in the frame, grant the book surfaces the most lyrical form of visibility. The evanescent and indistinct intan gibility of Parmiggiani’s wall lies in contrast with the almost weighable presence of Mastrovito’s wall, where the inclusion of a number of catalogues of famous exhibitions staged at the Museo di Palazzo Fabroni, over its thirty years of history, re-proposes a dichotomy so dear to the artist: that midway between the homage and misappropriation. T he large Mastrovito-Parmiggiani room occupies two floors of Palazzo Fabroni, dividing the second floor into two wings, linked by a walkway which affords a unique view from above of the film shown and the dialogue it establishes with the environment. It is by climbing the stair way clad in grey pietra serena that we access the space given over to temporary shows. Following the theme of the continuous appropriation of reality, Pistoia prepared an itiner ary which had no desire to complete the catalogue of Mastrovito’s themes, media and supports, but provided the opportunity to pick out common elements from the multiplicity. Through the presentation of six works from 2006 to 2020, the attempt was made to provide elements of understanding of the inner driving force behind his procedure, at the same time placing them under the microscope, through six different media which have emerged, one after the other, on Mastrovito’s palette."

Davide dall'Ombra in "I AM NOT LEGEND" exhibition catalogue, p. 188

Details

Io Non Sono Leggenda, Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2021, videodocumentation.

Installation view (recto) of the videoprojection of I Am Not Legend on about 10.000 books without covers

Installation view (verso) of the videoprojection of I Am Not Legend on about 10.000 books without covers

Installation view (verso) of the videoprojection of I Am Not Legend (2020, videoanimation, dur: 72 min) on about 10.000 books without covers

The little island of dr. Mastrovito, installation view at Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020

The little island of dr. Mastrovito, detail

Andrea s'è perso, installation view as a window at Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020

Le Monde est une invention sans futur, part III and part IV, installation view at Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020

Sant'Ippolito, installation view at Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020

60 original animation drawings from NYsferatu - Symphony of a century, Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020

Original animation boards from "I Am Not Legend", installation view at Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020

In Order of Appearance, installation view at Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2020