mostre1-larte-e-la-citta - nandocalabrese

Art and the City

A building is a building, a work of art is a work of art. A photographer is a photographer, an architect is an architect. Bringing together these four elements (material and human) can be very difficult if not impossible. The risk of ending up with a failed mix is very high.
No, not if the photographer is Nando Calabrese and the architect is Sergio Attanasio, architectural historian and president of the “Dimore storiche napoletane” Association. No, not if the buildings and artists have been chosen by these two friends, interpreters of a culture entirely expressed in Neapolitan, with great sensitivity.
And if the choice or suggestion of the building in which to host the work of art belongs to the architect, the framing, the “cut” of the image is entirely entrusted to the photographer’s lens.
The exhibition “Art and the City”, curated by Antonella Nigro and promoted by the Tempo Libero association with the municipal Department of Culture, set up at the Pan (open until February 12, every day except Tuesday, from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm and on Sundays until 2:30 pm) is a successful example of synergy between institutions and cultural associations; and above all, it is the beautiful experience of the meeting of two personalities, Attanasio and Calabrese, capable of collaborating by integrating their sensitivities towards Neapolitan architecture and art.
The result is a splendid exhibition, not to be missed, which has a double focus: the interior of Neapolitan buildings and the work chosen by the artists involved in this ambitious project.
The emotional impact, in front of the large photographs by Nando Calabrese is remarkable and, at least at first, disorienting in the sense that one must let oneself be carried away by emotion to understand that between the building and the artist’s work, always in color, an ironic dialogue is established between works, distant in time but close in sensitivity.
The parade of large-format photos, and excellently printed by Vittorio Gargiulo, in fact, in addition to presenting a critical look at the most significant voices of Neapolitan figurative art of recent years, also aims to be a representation of the history of Neapolitan civil architecture, without the presumption of selecting only the “monumental”.

The photographed buildings, in fact—not all of them well-known— also become a lesson in the history of Neapolitan architecture through the centuries. A map of the city, with all the photographed buildings indicated, helps even many Neapolitans to identify the sites, thus allowing a more attentive reading of that artistic civilization that the city has been able to express, over the centuries, through the work of well-known architects but also of obscure and unknown protagonists of the art of “building”.
The photographic set chosen, in fact, is of equal importance whether it is the staircase of the most beautiful Neapolitan palaces or the tranquil courtyard of Villa dell’Abete where the shadow of a thick palm invites a pleasant pause.
And so, distancing myself from everything around me, I move forward, my eyes captured by the large photos. It is a continuous surprise, from building to building, until I lose myself in the subtle game of recognizing the building and its relationship with the exhibited work. Forgotten or never-seen places are rediscovered and it is a reading that can only increase the pride of belonging to a civilization without useless and, let’s say it, anachronistic historical claims.
In Nando Calabrese’s photos, moving from dazzling white to black through all the shades of gray, a dialogue is born between the chosen place and the color of the exhibited work. And the choice to photograph the work with its artist proves to be particularly successful because it removes it from graphic abstraction, humanizing it and making the artist himself the subject of the photograph. In the end, the relationship that binds the space, the artist, his work, and the photographer is the result of a happy empathy, first and foremost with the environment in which the action takes place, with the history that the place evokes, and also with the most attentive contemporary Neapolitan figurative culture.
It is a play of references between spaces, lived by the artist with his work, and spaces photographed with love and a subtle vein of melancholy by Nando Calabrese; a melancholy with which his critical lens highlights the conditions of decay in which many of the buildings find themselves.
But, on the part of the sensitive Nando Calabrese, on closer inspection, it is an ironic melancholy, an acceptance of the passage of time. And irony also becomes the hallmark with which almost all the artists have played in this refined and cultured operation.
Thus the enchanted and naive gaze of Riccardo Dalisi fixes, challengingly, the viewer, inviting them to observe the object, placed at his feet, which will soon move up the long staircase of Palazzo Calabritto. He, Riccardo, believes in it; while, with a sly smile, Laura Cristinzio launches her red Ariadne’s thread, only apparently disordered because, in reality, that thread that unwinds along the steep staircase of Palazzo Sirignano is also the line cast toward the viewer to draw them into the magic of the image.
Armando De Stefano plays with nostalgia watched by the characters of one of his works, fixed for years on the ceiling of the university rectorate, Vincenzo Aulitto spreads, almost according to an ancient popular rite, his phantasmagorical canvas on the terrace from the staircase of Palazzo Marigliano-Di Capua and Lello Esposito smiles under the enormous head of his San Gennaro, whose gaze refers to his other famous work, Pulcinella, the eternal icon of a way of being Neapolitan, almost a secular San Gennaro.

I turn and am captured by the photograph in which Rosaria Matarese lets herself be enveloped in the vertigo of the elliptical staircase of Palazzo Mannajuolo. I look around; I would like to see them all again, more carefully, but there are so many images, too many to remember them all.
For now I am content to list all the artists present in the exhibition: Riccardo Dalisi, Lello Esposito, Gianni Pisani, Mario Persico, Armando De Stefano, Rosaria Iazzetta, Ahmad Alaa Eddin, Vincenzo Aulitto, Anna, Luisa and Rosaria Corcione, Mathelda Balatresi, Celesta Bufano, Alessia Cattaneo Della Volta, Marisa Ciardiello, Laura Cristinzio, Gerardo Di Fiore, Francesca Di Martino, Nicca Iovinella, Pietro Loffredo, Rosaria Matarese, Rosa Panaro, Gloria Pastore, Aulo Pedicini, Giuseppe Pirozzi, Tommaso Pirretti, Rezzuti–Scolavino, Sergio Riccio, Mimma Russo, Tony Stefanucci, Ernesto Terlizzi and Marianna Troise.
I will return to visit it several times and I am sure that, each time, entering these spaces, I will discover something more about that subtle dialogue between the color of the artistic creation and the black and white light that invades these photos.
Even the catalogue, published by Paparo, written by Sergio Attanasio with texts by Antonella Nigro, Clorinda Irace and Nino Daniele, for once, is not the usual brochure but a tool for further study. The music of Mahler and Tchaikovsky accompanies the beautiful presentation video of the exhibition made by Sergio Attanasio and Stefano Sovrani.
Outside the Museum, I step out into the noisy night preparing for its Saturday night ritual.
Francesco Divenuto