The Marconi Foundation is pleased to hold the return of a show of works that was originally hosted exactly forty years ago in the premises of Studio Marconi, founded in 1965.
La ripetizione differente was the title of the show, borrowed from an essay written by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and it substantially introduced, well in advance, what was to be called postmodernism or, in more appropriate terms in the field of visual arts, citazionismo, mode rétro, retour à.
The show aimed at seizing a natural and inexorable phenomenon, a dialectical or bi-polar system according to which, when someone has gone too far in one same direction, then needs to come back and, instead of looking at the future, starts plundering the past.
During his whole career de Chirico had masterfully employed this method that other artists were ready to profusely adopt at the time.
The show was thus tracking down the evident marks of a great return to the past within the boundaries in which it could take place.
Such boundaries were connected to the images drawn from “popular” media – dramatically topical in those years – that were often associated to finds of the past or that revisited pop myths in a subtle and irreverent way (Enrico Baj, Valerio Adami, Emilio Tadini, Richard Hamilton, that is the team selected by Giorgio Marconi with love and dedication).
Perhaps the Spanish artist Eduardo Arroyo, as well as the witty and provocative Ugo Nespolo, might also have fitted that group.
Neither could the spirit of 1968 with its “death of art”, especially rooted in the arte povera movement, avoid its last jumps of retrospection, as artists like Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis clearly showed.
In that same spirit, the show also included the German artist Gerhard Richter, the American John Baldessari, Bruno Di Bello, and the French couple Anne and Patrick Poirier.
All their works followed the dogmatic abolition of colour of 1968.
Though the youngest in the group, Salvo and Luigi Ontani, were already venturing to recover a bright polychromy, thus introducing a series of collateral movements, that were just burgeoning, such as Transavanguardia, Nuovi-nuovi and Anacronisti.
At the time, they were only flanked by Giancarlo Croce’s luxurious portraits of solemn characters, Plinio Martelli’s trend of embellishing the skin with tattoos and Urs Lüthi’s roses scattered on the floor, as a contrast to the meanness and vulgarity of waste and accumulated trash.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of the Quaderno della Fondazione Marconi no. 14 containing a text by Renato Barilli, illustrations of the works on exhibit and the reproduction of the first publication dedicated by Studio Marconi to the Ripetizione differente published in 1974.
