Balance
GAMC Museum of modern and contemporary art
Viareggio - 2015
The proposal of Senator Giovanni Pieraccini for a collaboration project with the GAMC Museum of Modern Art in Viareggio in 2019 led the Rossi to evaluate the possibility that what had happened in China could be implemented in such a short time.
In 2013 he was assigned a space, suitable for the printing house, adjacent to the GAMC. The same will take the name of the International Center of Graphic Art 2RCGAMC.
At the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015 the first Master in Publishing, Management and in collaboration with the Academy of Florence takes place. In which Valter and Elonora Rossi teach their techniques to the students. Valter Rossi thus discovers his true passion for teaching.
From China, Chinese technicians are invited by the Academy to do workshops in Woodcut and Mezzotint.
At the end of the Master, three participating students won a scholarship donated by the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation and were able to continue their apprenticeship with the Rossi.
Presentation by Senator Giovanni Pieraccini
Qhis first exhibition of the 2RCGAMC International Center for Graphic Art is important for many reasons: first of all it closes a long period that began ten years ago, when I noticed the considerable graphic heritage passed through my donation to GAMC, I had the idea of supporting the Museum with a School of Graphics for young students.
It was, then, a modest idea but there was a meeting in Rome with Valter Rossi and the idea grew, as the difficulties grew together. It was a very difficult ten years and with this exhibition my ancient idea became flesh and body. The birth of a modern international cultural center in the bitter and difficult days of its tragic ruin is no small event for Viareggio. international between Viareggio, Beijing and Chinese culture.
The exhibition also testifies to the network of institutes and foundations linked to the operation and financing of the center, thus restoring to the Viareggio culture that ability to be a center of correlation and connection as it was in its great years, even on a national level.
First of all, the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence is connected which, in collaboration with Valter Rossi, has carried out the decisive work in the choice of high-level professors and in that of young students; The Nando Paretti Foundation, the Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca Foundation, the Candido Sperone Foundation of Rome (Fendi) and the Perceptive Robotics Laboratory of the TeCIP Institute of the Scuola Superiore also financed the master through the provision of scholarships. S.Anna of Pisa.
This same exhibition is made possible thanks to a grant provided by the Confucius Institute, connected to the Scuola S. Anna in Pisa, and to funds provided for the master.
We must be grateful to all these institutions that continue to give Viareggio a non-provincial role, through the very rare work of giving the center full financial autonomy, so that the Municipality of Viareggio did not have to pay even one euro and does not have to pay any. not even in the future.
Being a more than rare and almost unique result, the silence around the Center that continues today is truly amazing. The exhibition breaks it down and makes the Center itself known to the citizens.
On the basis of an evident error of interpretation, the Center had to overcome considerable difficulties even for its survival, having been considered a purely private institution, while instead it is - like many Italian cultural institutions - a public-private institution: 2RC of Valter Rossi, as a private party, he donated presses, equipment and professionalism; Arcus, as a public part, financed the restructuring and management of the laboratory and of the didactic classrooms and artist studios;
The PIUSS Regione Toscana financed the redevelopment and structural readjustment of the laboratory on behalf of the Municipality, which became the owner, with the specific aim of making it a unique and autonomous art graphics laboratory. Finally, the exhibition of the students also closes this misunderstanding.
Of course, the value of an exhibition does not consist in the difficulties it has managed to overcome but in the artistic value of its works and this value is evident in the young students. The works on display are those of valid and promising young people, who here begin their artistic curriculum or - if you like - their career, giving Viareggio a role of talented midwife.
Allow me to close with my consideration that is dear to me. I have worked all my life and I continue to do so for a culture that does not close itself within the narrow national borders but has an international dimension, is a dialogue between cultures. The two Chinese interns present at the first course of the Center, who confirm the connection with China, worked in the laboratory and gave birth to the first works. With great kindness they came together with the other students to bring me, in the memory of my first distant idea, their work and to give it to me.It is a beautiful work and you can read the sign of Chinese art, combined with the sign of art. western. This capacity for integration between the two cultures was and is for me the highest gratitude I could have had and it is also the highest praise I have received.
In Bilico edited by Elisabetta Trincherini
Professor of History of Contemporary Art
Equilibrium collects and presents, in addition to a work of the same name by a group with six heads and XNUMX hands, six artist's books and some prints by young artists selected by the historic Stamperia d 'Arte XNUMXRC di Valter and Eleonora Rossi. These are names that are tutelary and world-wide reference for art printing. And, for those who are never aware of it, just browse, even casually, the pages of the catalog edited by Achille Bonito Oliva Double dream of XNUMXRC art between artist and creator, to realize the historical significance of this printing house that over the years Settanta used a New York office alongside the Roman one and today, also thanks to the Chinese one, continues to boast the advantage of working only and always with the greatest.
Placed, in more than half a century of activity, from West to East, in the unfolding of phenomena from the instant before the globalized and fluid world of contemporary art consecrates the success of an artist.
This already makes Balance in itself a curious fact, and it is with regret that the writer learns the uncertainty about the future of a far-sighted and advanced project for the Versilian territory, which is the one that involves an artistic-cultural entity of this brought together with the GAMC of Viareggio, its Municipality and the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence.
Laura Peres, Laura Fonsa, Irene Puglisi, Elisa Favilli, Elena Mantovani and Nicola Salotti must therefore be framed in this perspective: the desire of 2RC to invest in young artists, collaborating in the completion of their specific training that makes them "hybrid" figures . The balance the artists talk about is not only the one able to make their specificities coexist within a collective work, but also the one that could and should characterize their present and future career, poised between the ability to lend themselves to realization of the artistic dreams of others and to give course to their own.
Laura Peres's work includes etching and aquatint techniques, which she also manages with confidence, even if her distinctive trait is probably to be found in the water and cyanotype double matrix woodcut of Astrolabe, in the photoengraving on copper of the Rotations lunar and the artist's book Tè -tra-de, a name that combines the reference to both the red moon and the four lunar eclipses, called "blood", which occurred in the 2014-2015 two-year period, and the tetradic cult, or the four divinities that the artist identifies in his adventure companions. Printer and photographer, Peres lends her dual training to works that combine the refinement of printing with the photographic matrix, with a tribute to the chalcotypic experiments of the late nineteenth century.
Laura Fonsa inscribes her cultured and aesthetically successful work in the cyclical nature of natural rhythms, staid alternations, beneficial and necessary for the flourishing of both the natural element on earth and the mental one in the head, which interpenetrate well in the prints. Liquid crystals, Solleva your sails, Macine. It is no coincidence that the other pole of attraction of his research is the development of numerical-mathematical laws, so the Fibonacci sequence and the golden section are, together with the natural element, the protagonists of the artist's book Forma Mentis. The aesthetic researches of the poverists, like the alchemical element in Duchamp, inspire her for a personal and autonomous reasoning that embraces multiple printing techniques in a few collected and effective moves.
Irene Puglisi for her artist book project 46 Querce for 46 Antenne is moved by ecological assumptions that aim to solicit a debate on the fate of the Sicilian natural reserve of the cork oak of Niscemi, today compromised by MUOS (Mobile User Objective System), a modern satellite telecommunications system of the US Navy whose current installation already exceeds the legal limits imposed on electromagnetic emissions. To denounce a current problem, the son of an avant-garde and ruthless technology, Puglisi uses an ancient technique; thus the aquatint on a copper plate, the etching and the dry point seem to want to reconnect with other works of pressing denunciation that in the history of art from Goya to Picasso have preferred printing as a privileged means of expression. Also evident is the reference to the 7000 Oaks of Beuys which, in the 82 edition of Documenta, brought 7000 basalt stones to Kassel to be planted to replace as many oak trees.
The journalist and researcher Elisa Favilli lends herself to the project by experimenting with an artist's book entitled itinere which refers in the aesthetic solutions to the experiments of visual poetry, but whose fundamental objective is to find an alternative support in the form of a graphic layout to a 'operation of social denunciation that has had the printed press of newspapers as the primary means of dissemination. Where the operation of denunciation is absent, Favilli focuses on his lines of research in the historical-artistic field concerning above all on the architecture of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, as in the case of the aquatint on copper Stanza.
Elena Mantovani with the artist's book Blaubart Beyond the Door proposes a work with a strong choreographic impact: the starting point and reflection are in fact the choreographies of Pina Bausch and in particular that of Blaubart. Etchings and aquatints move, as the bodies directed by Bausch had already done in '77, in search of a supple and powerful gesture. The ultra-contemporary man-woman relationship of that “ballet” - which was no longer possible to define as such - was transcended into a violent choreographic dimension that Mantovani's dry points seek and encounter. Just as the attraction-destruction ritual that the drama staged returns in the stylized and elongated bones and joints that seem to stretch under the pressure of an extreme effort and then return to position. Allusive to this feeling are also the black manner Mutazioni and the etching II Ventre.
Nicola Salotti, who trained as a painter and as such continues to operate, alongside this path that of art printing, here proposes IO Input Output as an artist's book. It is clear from Salotti's research that there is an interest in the meeting ground between art and science, which is also not by chance in a precarious balance, which has little connotation as a space of passionate connivance and seems to us more to represent the recording by the artist of that unscrupulousness conscious that the drive for a wild technology seems to lead everything and man certainly. Etchings and aquatints, graphically convincing here, describe a multifaceted theoretical object which is this meeting place. As well as the acorporality of the virtual, in Virilio's well-known definition, and effectively rendered by Salotti both with dry typing and with photoluminescence, a technique that makes it possible to assign a different corporeality depending on whether one observes his prints in the dark. or in the light.
In the same context it is possible to frame works such as Chinese black manners
Emersions and Metallic Biologies.