LE REALTÀ ORDINARIE

The territory that this project attempts to map is therefore a permeable one, and potentially quite vast: it includes genre paintings (or ambiguous, fragmentary attempts to work within genres) as well as more hybrid or even abstract pictures inspired by little epiphanies, by the observation of minor everyday events or phenomena.

Le realtà ordinarie is also an exhibition about time, and how it flows in a seemingly unrippled stream around subjects and forms connected to the real world—whether they are varied and repeated, unfold in a series, or stand out as atypical within the featured artists’ oeuvre.

The show also examines a tradition grounded in the twentieth-century “return to order,” a trend that can be seen throughout Italian painting after World War I and the most feverish years of the avant-garde. It tries to reflect on the ambiguous meaning of the word “ordinary” (etymologically: obeying the usual order), bearing in mind how the current state of painting relates to the upheavals of its historical juncture.

Lastly, there is a light that seems to move through Le realtà ordinarie: a direct, noonday light that evenly illuminates things or transfigures them with its glare, pushing them towards abstraction—an abstraction of “light-colors” that suggests the memory of a figure, or alludes to the ordinary world through hints, echoes and vague presences.