The stories of Bertozzi and Casoni in the museums of Imola. – Blog Carlo Franz

Bertozzi and Casoni. Tranche de vie”, three sites for a major exhibition in their Imola. Until February 18, 2024, the city of Romagna will dedicate enough space to the famous artistic duo with an exhibition event that will bring together all three Imola public museums: Palazzo Tozzoni, San Domenico Museum and Rocca Sfo.Rzheska. The exhibition, curated by Diego Galizzi, Director of Imola Musei, is organized by the municipality of Imola – Imola Musei, thanks to the support of various local organizations, including the Cooperativa Ceramica di Imola, the main partner of the project.

“With this exhibition,” emphasizes cultural adviser Giacomo Gambi, “the city, which has been home to their creations for over forty years, wants to pay tribute to Bertozzi and Casoni by turning its civic museums into a theater, a large-scale exhibition that celebrates their artistic genius and tells , almost like a witness, the path that led them to growth and assertion. The connection between the city and the artists has found an opportunity to be further strengthened by the donation in 2022 to the Imola Museums of a particularly significant group of works now on the permanent itinerary of the San Domenico Museum, among which the monumental sculpture “Choose Paradise” (1997), one of the most well-known and exemplary works, unanimously recognized as the fundamental node from which the experiments of Bertozzi and Casoni began to move through hitherto unexplored territories.

“Bertozzi and Casoni,” comments curator Diego Galizzi, “have established themselves on the panorama of contemporary art as real rule breakerscapable of subverting rules and prejudices and revolutionizing the very understanding of artistic pottery. It is a vision of great relevance and importance that, through wonder, questions our mental categories and continually questions ourselves.”

The heart of the exhibition project, which consists of three separate sections in one of the museums of Imola, unfolds in luxurious halls Palazzo Tozzoni (“Tranche de life”)noble residence, which since then seventy have become part of the public heritage of the city, along with all their furnishings, and today constitute a very interesting house-museum open to the public. Here the works of Bertozzi and Casoni dialogue with the rooms and the original furnishings of the building, in a journey through the memories and reconstruction of Tozzoni’s daily life, the artistic duo’s disturbing creative ideas are taken into account. A penchant for amazement, an innate sense of irony, and a one-to-one language. mimesis the reckless and the exciting find in this magnificent setting a unique opportunity to plunge into the wonderful game of exchange between reality and fiction.

“What is being played out at Palazzo Tozzoni,” adds Galizzi, “is not a traditional exhibition, but rather a choral installation focused on disorientation, where the actors, called upon to voice this “laboratory of doubt,” are together a setting, a setting, and a piece of art. works of art belonging to the house-museum, and selected works by Bertozzi and Casoni. The works – and there are more than thirty of them – roughly reflect the last twenty years of their activity and for which they are known throughout the world: various forms vanitas

accumulations of bits and pieces of everyday life, piles of bones, unexpected intrusions of animals often presented as mocking veterans standing on the remnants of our consumerist society.

“In Nusa” instead it is the name of the section created in the quadriportic Museum of San Domenico, which, unlike the Palazzo Tozzoni, is a journey entirely based on storytelling. An unprecedented exhibition that for the first time wants to tell – in a certain sense – about Bertozzi and Casoni before Bertozzi and Casoni, that is, before the development of that original and broken language that today unequivocally characterizes the Imola duo, made their artistic proposal grow into something more wide. and generally recognized. The exhibition, consisting of approximately sixty works, highlights the artists’ periods of exploration and expression from the early 1980s to around the mid-1990s. The landing point of the exhibition is the turning point of 1997-98, to which Bertozzi and Casoni arrive with works that are gradually becoming more monumental and open to new materials and more complex processes. The symbolic work of this transition into a new phase is Pick a Sky (1997), a work full of symbolic meanings; Located in the museum’s permanent collections on the top floor, the monumental Madonna with the Lawnmower in the Garden of Eden offers visitors the perfect end to an exhibition and the anticipation of a new creative adventure.

If the section of the exhibition created in Palazzo Tozzoni is the heart of the exhibition project, then the installation in Rocca Sforzesca “Death of Eros”.

no doubt suggests the importance of visual and emotional zest.

Under the centuries-old brick vault of the south-eastern tower of the fortress, immersed in a bare and austere atmosphere, the suicide of Eros takes place, depicted by artists in the form of a faun, the emblem of erotic attraction. “Death del Eros” is one of the longest and most problematic projects of Bertozzi&Casoni. Conceived back in 2000, this work has been a real inventive and technical challenge for artists over the years, especially the recently deceased Stefano Dal Monte Casoni. The end of the enterprise now, a few months after the loss of one of the two souls of the “target firm”, is an important sign of how the kind of creative osmosis between the two artists has ended, thanks to which everything is still possible.

Charles Franz