Il 19 maggio 2013 si inaugura a Brescia, presso la Galleria dell’Incisione, la mostra “Scultura italiana 1915-1945. Dal fascino del Liberty al recupero della classicità”, a cura di Giovanna Caterina de Feo e Chiara Fasser.
Saranno esposti i lavori di una ventina di artisti attivi nell’Italia centro-settentrionale fra il 1915 e il 1945, periodo di grande vitalità dell’arte italiana.
 
Con il progressivo scemare delle avanguardie storiche e l’insorgere di un contesto sociale e culturale profondamente cambiato dagli sconvolgimenti della prima guerra mondiale e dall’affermarsi del movimento fascista, gli artisti propongono nuove forme espressive che perverranno ad esiti formali non uniformi.
 
Il cosiddetto “ritorno all’ordine”, divulgato dalla rivista “Valori Plastici” di Mario Broglio, significa per le arti visive un nuovo rapporto fra tradizione e modernità, nonché il recupero della sapienza tecnica e del mestiere. Gli scultori guardano ai grandi maestri del passato e alla loro interpretazione dell’anatomia umana; la scultura monumentale, che già conobbe grande slancio con la fine della prima guerra mondiale e la relativa celebrazione della vittoria e degli eroi di guerra, ebbe molta fortuna anche sotto il regime fascista, che spesso la utilizzò per celebrare i nuovi protagonisti e ideali di partito.
 
Il fascismo, come gli altri regimi dittatoriali europei, non mancherà di sfruttare l’arte a fini propagandistici, in molti casi col consenso, tacito o espresso, degli artisti stessi. Tuttavia interpretare la ricerca artistica di questo periodo secondo una prospettiva ideologica significa sottovalutarne la complessità storica, la validità e in molti casi l’eccellenza.

Paci contemporary is glad to present the first solo show in Italy of Éric Rondepierre, French artist that –since 1990- bases his own work on rescue of vintage films. « Rondepierre - in an innovative way, that allowed him to become one of the most appreciated French artists - selects and extracts frames from movies, expands them and turns them into photographs on which the grain of the film-matter remains visible. He rescues these fragments of movies from oblivion and gives them a new form thanks to an operation of metamorphosis that changes their condition; transmutes their status.»
 
His works are cinematographic frames fixed in images, where «paradoxically, the photographic permanence thus obtained does not turn into a temporal stasis, (…) the filmic image does not freeze, but opens towards new stories, towards a new time, and thus works as an activator of the imaginary. Eric Rondepierre’s images come to life thanks to their forced immobility, and become the bearer of a great load of imaginary; of an independent and enigmatic life.»
 
Durin the sow, we can discover the work of this famous artist, -who vaunts exhibitions at Moma (New York) and at Center Pompidou (Paris)-, through some works by his most important series.
 
« In the series Précis de décomposition, from the early nineties, and then in Moires (1996-1998), moving through the anonymous movies of the beginning of the century, Rodepierre chooses and enlarges images that have been altered, worn out by time or damaged by bad conservation, as if he wanted to analyze the effects of corruption on the gelatinous support with a magnifying glass.»
 
In the sieries Diptyka, Rondepierre investigates the effects of the editing, cutting the frames off from film reels and reversing the top and the bottom of the image. In the most recent series DSL, however, he analyzes the interferences of art films (Hitchcock, Lynch, Godard, Truffaut, Ophüls ...) that often arise when the film is transmitted through a computer screen.
 
In the series Partis communes (2005-07) or Seuils (2008-09), Rondepierre acquires an even greater narrative role: «In these last works Rondepierre amalgamates two media together: archive images from old beginning-of-the-century movies and contemporary photographs shot by himself in his daily universe. The result is constituted by images of great charm, that allow us to meet characters from other times, while they seem to wander nowadays in the metro in Paris or through streets and parks crowded with visitors.»
 
Finally, in Les Trente Étreintes the artist has selected thirty frames (out of over a thousand) of a deteriorated sequence lasting about one minute: « The filmic object, frozen by photography and raised to the dignity of image, indeed preserves a sort of deep mystery, impossible to transpose to the immediate level of representation.»
 
Éric Rondepierre is one of the most interesting artist of the contemporary art scene, fitting into that fruitful artistic trend «able to perpetuate the vision, voluntarily standing on the borderline between movie and photography».
 
On the work of Éric Rondepierre have written, among the others, Régis Durand (director of the National Center of Photography and then the Jeu de Paume, Paris), Quentin Bajac (conservator of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and new director of the department of photograph of the MoMA in New York) and Philippe Dubois (author of the famous book “The photographic act”, and professor of film and contemporary art at the University of Paris III).
 
The phrases in quotes are quotations from the text by Gigliola Foschi “Eric Rondepierre. In Praise of Metamorphosis ”, which you can find in the catalog published for the exhibition.