In Lecco Ligabue and the Art of Outsider – Lecco – Arte.it

Lecco – Eight lives, eight personal stories, extraordinary artistic languages, poetic carriers of different points of view, united by their outsider nature, suspended between art and madness, tell the public of Palazzo delle Fereate of Lecco.
It happens from 13 June to 2 November thanks to the exhibition Antonio Ligabue and the Art of OutsidersA path that investigates the complex relationship between art and madness through 14 works by Ligabue and a selection of about forty works by Italian authors such as Filippo de Pisis, Gino Sandri, Carlo Zinelli, Pietro Ghizzardi.
Simona Bartolena sews a story with personal events and the production of authors who have written important pages of the Italian art history of the twentieth century, protagonists who, within the walls of a psychiatric hospital, have discovered the power of art and their talent as their common thread.

Antonio Ligabue, teams with the Oxen, 1953-54, oil on the table of Faesite, Corporate Collection The Bper Banca Gallery

Produced and built by Vidi Cultural and Ponte43, in collaboration with the municipality of Lecco and the Lecco Urban Museum system, embraces the exhibition 14 works by Antonio Ligabue and about forty paintings and drawings made by masters who have known the asylum or whose research anomalous paths followed, outside the box. Some of them came in psychiatric structures when they were already located painters, others discovered artists in the rooms of a nursing home. Introduced by an installation by contemporary artist Giovanni Sesia, who worked on the theme of internes in the shelter, with the help of the photos of their faces in his works, taken from the archives of the most important Italian structures of the early twentieth century. In Lecco, some of his most important masterpieces are presented by Ligabue during his tormented existence, by hospital admissions on the San Lazzaro Psychiatric Institute of Reggio Emilia for the hospitalization of Mendicity or Gualtieri.

The path will embrace the most recurring reasons for its painting, from wild beasts to the landscapes for landscapes of Po Valley, from the self -port rages to two non -published works, from private collecting objects: Self -portrait with Dragonfly one Pasture. Identified to this long master with the misleading definition of Naïf, which has long disrupted its concept, the elegant painting of Filippo is accompanied by the pisis. After the happy periods spent in Paris and London, the pisis returns to Italy, where a subtle evil body and mind overwhelms. His extraordinary sensitivity is converted into a profound pain of life, an uncontrollable restlessness. To find a cure for his illness, he enters Villa Fiorita in Brugherio, a structure specialized in Brianza Monzese.
The LECCO exhibition unveils a few moving still lifes and a glimpse of gross (of private collector) made in those years, authentic painkillers, where the trail of the discomfort of which the painter is the victim is clear. To express it, there are few touches, pure brush layers, black side flavors, dark shadows, on a canvas that has largely been discovered, in which you can breathe in a desperate sense of emptiness. It is then on the colored works of the Livorno area Mario Puccini, back of the four -year experience in the San Nicolò Psychiatric Hospital in Siena, and still on the painting of Gino Sandri, refined intellectual, extraordinary writer and painter with a happy hand, an existing by the asylum. His designs of the guests of the asylum sketch the characters of a varied humanity, on the margins of society, but always full of poetry.

Gino Sandri, without title, Drawing on paper, private collection

The portraits of the internees in the Mombello axis are also the privileged subject of Rino Ferrari, who entered the psychiatric clinic after the traumatic experience that lived during the Kefalonia massacre, while Carlo Zinelli finds an extraordinary communication tool in art. Thanks to the proximity of the psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli, Zinelli has created works that are today recognized as one of the most interesting expressions of artificial brut.

To complete the review are two lunges on Pietro Ghizzardi and Edoardo Fraquelli. The first portrays the fascinating women of the country with a style that reveals unexpected primitivist accents and with a palette with infinite gray series. The second, came into the shelter and left the art for some time, leaves chromatic creations behind and with a plate full of excitement, works in which the order and silence seem to have the best.
His painting of light, of lively yellow is the almost inevitable outcome of an inner liberation, of a new consciousness and deep hope.