Walking around Arte Fiera

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Gabriella Cardazzo portrayed by patrick Procktor, Palazzo Bentivoglio Bologna

Martha Spaniards

Romina Bassu

Meetings, interests and exchanges that intertwine with each other. happens atBologna Art Fair, the first of the year in Italy which opens to the public today until 5 February, a 46th edition that Simone Menegoi describes to Il Foglio using three words: “reprise, relaunch and rescue”. An appointment organized in a few months after the last post-pandemic edition, “inclusive and attentive to social and environmental transformations” – added Enea Righi – chosen by him as managing director – “an event necessary to bring his sensitivity and competence to the definition and creation of a pleasant welcome for citizens, tourists, gallery owners and other collectors”. Bologna will also be in turmoil due to the threat of attacks after the events relating to Cospito, but it has decided to react in the best possible way with offers inside the fair and in the city, among galleries and private palaces, creating a pleasant bustle of people from Italy and from abroad related to or in any case interested in the world of art, ready to take the pavilions 25 and 26 of Bologna Fiere by storm among the over 140 exhibitors present in the Main Section.

We did it too in previewstarting right from those spaces full of works ranging from Modern to post-war art up to contemporary research.

The province – since the neon with the inscription of the same name Flavio Favelli – is the protagonist on the stand of the Sales study, the Roman gallery of Norberto Ruggeri with Davide Monaldi who invented the ceramic intercoms with which anyone can fantasize. The super star is her, Romina Bassu, who recovers for his new works that queer line that he had already started in 2014. At Arte Fiera he presents Waiting in which he depicts a seated man wearing black stiletto heels in the act of reflecting, a sort of thinker à la Rodin but 2.0 which normalizes the emotional aspect in a daily life made up of simple, neutral and intimate gestures. Next to it is two girls in Swing which, like the other works, has a balanced theatricality, held firmly by the trust and acceptance that exists between them, shown in Bassi’s cold colors, in stark contrast to the content which is more disturbing, but attracts and conquers every time.

The teal blue created by Valerio Beruti stars her since Marco Rossi Contemporary Art in an elegant sculpture with a little girl who creates plays of light on the wall. Not far away, she is admired by the protagonist of a sculpture made of Carrara marble and Veronese marble that recalls the protagonists of her pop-up book, La giostra di Nina Carosello, a magic on paper (complete with light inside) published from Gallucci Publisher which reproduces its famous and homonymous sculpture that has been around the world making thousands of people’s heads spin – positively.

Central themes revolving around cultural and historical developments and our collective, social and political heritage are revealed like a mosaic in the works of the Genevan Marc Bauerprotagonist at the gallery of Guild Lavia. We are in Bologna, but Antonello Violawhich we find at the stand of Alessandro Casciaro Art Gallery of Bolzano, takes us to the Italian islands that he knows and likes best. Mixing art, nature and time in an abstract art that is as engaging as it is alienating, the Roman artist transforms the invisible into the visible using royal blue, green and gold which give space to the energy of a rebirth. Color is also present in Veronese’s works Martha Spaniardsat the Gallery Continue. His Humanoids involve us in a dance that is the triumph and emphasis of hands and gazes. Particular is the Maelström series, a deliberate homage to Edgar Allan Poe, but thanks to her, we emerge more alive and energetic than ever from that phenomenon caused by the tides. Really gorgeous are the Stem terracotta stems resembling human figures created by Agostino Iacurci for the gallery Former electrophonics.

The best stand? We have no doubts: that of Poggiali Gallery (Florence, Pietrasanta and Milan). The patron Alessandro and his two sons Lorenzo and Marco, the Scilla and Cariddi of Italian art, have managed to create a space of their own, as huge as it is hypnotic. The large-scale works, white and pure like an unexpected snowfall in Gstaad by Claudius Parmiggianiare breath-taking, skillfully exhibited with those of Amulf Rainer and the sculpture of Erwin Wurm, protagonist of a recent Florentine exhibition hosted in their two city galleries and in the spectacular Piazza Santa Maria Novella. To amaze you, in the other room, the tattooed sculptures of Fabio Vialereflections, like you who will admire them, in the dreamlike mirrors of Lynchian memory of Goldschmied & Chiarihave a look at the colorful canvases of Basil Kinchaid. Every artist, from the Poggiali, is treated in the same way and there are no hierarchical distinctions. Everyone finds space and thanks to those “magnificent three”, he feels at home: welcomed, criticized, pampered and loved at the same time, just like in the family.

Yuri Ancarani is at the entrance to the fair with an installation on the maxi screen in Piazza della Costituzione, the first Led Wall Commission, but it is also the protagonist at the MAMbo (Modern Art Museum of Bologna) with the personal Atlantis 2017-2023. Soon it will also be at the PAC in Milan, but in the meantime it is here to make emotions explode in the Sala delle Ciminiere of the Bolognese museum, transformed into a sort of Cocoricò thanks to the curator Lorenzo Balbia dreamlike and real representation of that world in itself which is the island of Sant’Erasmo, in Venice.

The pictorial process of Stephen Rosenthal is always the result of a search for the unseen, the desired, the flash of the eye and his paintings – at the Bolognese gallery P420 – are so unusual that it is almost inevitable to wonder how they came about, combined with the works of Philip DePisis like the Vase of Flowers that he painted in the nursing home in Brugherio.

Also reminiscent of De Pisis are some works by Patrick Procktorprotagonist of the unmissable exhibition A View From a Window which is dedicated to him Bentivoglio Palace, special and magical place. The attentive curator Thomas Pasquali succeeded in the impossible: bringing together all the works of the artist loved/hated by Lucian Freud, doing a long research in his London years, also helped a lot by Ian Massey, author of the only biography ever published on this flamboyant, Marxist artist and true snob, homosexual out of the closet and father of a family, traveler to exotic places and assiduous visitor to Venice, obviously present in his watercolours, for example in a particular glimpse from a bar on the Zattere. The portraits of the actress Jill Bennett and the gallerist Gabriella Cardazzo are splendid, but also those of Christopher Gibbs, Juliet Benson and a young Derek Jarman, not to mention the nudes, as explicit as they are wonderful. In closing, the highlight: an old passport photo of the deceased artist friend Mario Dubsky juxtaposed with a more recent one. Art is exalted thanks to Procktor and we with him in this Bologna that is more alive than ever.