Works
Press Release
Exhibitions
words by Lucrezia Galeotti
The Presence of the Past. La Strada Novissima is the title that Paolo Portoghesi chooses for the premiere International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 1980. Through a journey of 70 meters, characterized by life-size residential facades, Portoghesi proposes a reflection on the topic of the urban road. There were approximately twenty architects involved, including Frank O.Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Ricardo Bofill, GRAU.
Giulio Scalisi maintains the same approach to the theme of the street on the occasion of the exhibition at the spaces of ANCO, presenting its new project: Babylon Street.
The reference to Portoghesi's operation is to be understood in a decorative and narrative manner, as the artist creates thirteen historiated tablets for the exhibition with elements attributable to the concept of “urban exterior” placed in relation to the human figure.
In a pedagogical way, Scalisi presents a timeline of salient events of existence, analyzing them
the deepest and most contradictory aspects. Breastfeeding, education, sexual practices, sexual processes social construction and deconstruction. Storytelling delicately touches and synthesizes the crossroads that the human figure faces, the process occurs in a consequential manner, inexorably from the first at the last table.
When you have to choose who you are, When you have to work, When you
go out to play, When you would do anything for it, are just some of the titles of the works they comprise the main installation of the project. The adverb When accentuates the inevitability of reality even more, we know for sure that something will happen. The carved wooden silhouettes bring with them the tradition of the Italian post-war period. The references to the great masters are evident. Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà and Fortunato De Pero for shapes and volumes. De Chirico and Sironi for their direct relationship with the figuration of architecture.
The tables unfolded in a helical structure give access to a "Babel" of events.
Babel, Latin translation into “Babylon”, has over time become synonymous with chaos and disorder. Second the writings we find in the Bible (Genesis, XI, 1-9), a vengeful God does not approve the project ambitious of building a tower reaching towards the sky. As punishment his wrath is unleashed on men, confusing their only tool of understanding, language. The project comes thus abandoned and the men dislocated in various parts of the world. This feeling of conflict compared to an otherness above our will can be found within Scalisi's narrative.
Furthermore, for the first time, the artist uses the story in a different way. Babylon Street is the first exhibition project that Scalisi creates without a writing system behind him, relegating it to word a secondary importance compared to the expressive autonomy of the figuration.
Also present in the exhibition are three works on paper, portraits of childhood, adolescence and maturity. Three seasons of being, punctuated by very specific subjects, the Pied Piper / the Narcissus / the dead man living. According to Western portraiture, the child looks to the right (Mi Fa Sol, 2023), towards the future, the young man looks straight at himself anchored to the present (Two eyes through the pond, 2023) and the adult looks to the left towards what has already been (Time's passed, 2023).