PRESS RELEASE
Group exhibition: “Art is Now”
Organizers: Art Director Angela Fagu
Opening Show: Friday 3rdMay 2019 at 19:00
Duration Show: 3rdMay –27th May 2019
Location: Galleria360 Via il Prato 11R Florence
Website: www.galleria360.it Shop-online: http://shop.galleria360.it/
Email: info@galleria360.it Tel. +39 0552399570
Opening hours: from Monday to Friday inclusive 10:00 a.m -1:00 p.m. | 3:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday closed
Free entry
“No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian’s drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.” (John Ruskin)
According to Plotinus, a neo-Platonic philosopher who lived in the 3rd century AD, the work of art coincides with “the idea”; that is, the perfect image that the artist has in himself and on which he founds his work. So beauty would reside in the archetype, not in the outer form. Benedetto Croce takes up the concept of Neoplatonic artworks and exaggerates it. For the Italian philosopher, art is pure intuition and the artwork corresponds to the “interior image of the artist“, as a pure expression of genius. According to Walter Benjamin, German philosopher of the twentieth century, what distinguishes an artistic work is instead its “hic et nunc”, a here and now, which is affirmed in a particular space-time plot and which constitutes the artistic creation’s characteristics of uniqueness, authenticity and authority. Moreover, according to the German philosopher the birth of new techniques of reproduction (and in particular of photography) would have deprived the artwork of its “aura”.
Today, The Gioconda printed on a scarf, Botticelli’s Spring on a cup or the Pollock’s famous “dripping” on a t-shirt would seem to agree with Walter Benjamin’s ideas. So, the reproducibility of the artwork has really caused the irremediable loss of the aura, namely the magical and unique “here and now” that blends with the artistic creation distinguishing it?
In Ars Poetica, Orazio affirms that poetry was meant to be a vehicle for knowledge and at the same time had to be able to stir up emotions, to move: the poet had in fact the task of showing to the public the passions he wanted to transmit. Indeed, what distinguishes an original artwork from its reproduction is precisely the fact of arising from an emotion and, at the same time, of stirring a feeling. So, although the advent of reproduction techniques have undermined the concept of “spatio-temporal uniqueness” of an artistic work, the presupposition of any aesthetic experience necessary to “live” the artwork remains unbroken: that is, the emotion.
“Art is Now” is therefore a contemporary art exhibition of foreign artists, whose works are connected to the present, but at the same time they go “beyond” that hic et nunc since they are able to open the eyes of the mind and of the heart and to push us upwards. After all, “the art is able to express and make visible the human need to go beyond what is seen, manifests the thirst and the search for the infinite. Indeed, it’s like an open door to the infinite, to a beauty and a truth that go beyond the everyday life” (Pope Benedict XVI).
The inauguration will take place on 3rd Friday of May 2019, at 19.00, in Via il Prato 11r, Florence. During the opening will be offered a welcome drink while Jazz musicians will play live animating the evening and creating a pleasant union between Art and Music.
aVirginia Bazzechi Ganucci Cancellieri