The exhibition project stems from trying to elaborate a question that in the last period, characterized by a profound global crisis, many have asked themselves, not only private citizens but the whole institutional span: what is art for, what is its real usefulness within the complex facets of a civil society?
In some respects the emergency circumstances have determined, at least, a lower ambiguity between the parties, therefore a greater possibility of clarification of the power relations between the cultural world and the juridical-state one.
Basically what emerged as an answer tells of a completely negligible vision of artistic practice as a whole, mostly linked to entertainment or a surplus far removed from the real essential needs of a community. A practice therefore in no way organic to the construction of a balanced, plural and democratically healthy society.
But is it really so? What is this conception of art defective in, if it is?
To try to answer these questions, we decided to address them to some of the most significant masters of modern and contemporary Western art, questioning their works and above all what they presuppose. We can certainly say that what all these champions have in common is the conscious and voluntary assumption of a posture of discontinuity with respect to their own era.and what was taken for granted and certain in it. A constant and progressive tension aimed at responsibly elaborating new territories of thought that were previously unexplored or unknown. The complex phantasmagoria called reality, which today appears so tragic and so in need of competent and free narrators, was not perceived by them as something to be taken passively, but as a mobile and in some ways chaotic matter to be molded and forged with the rhythm of a new and vital knowledge. Furthermore, creative practice assumed a significant "political" task: transforming resentment, which was cyclically forming as a destructive force of social equilibrium, into the ability to evolve thought and action, today we would call this welfare .
The world thus renewed itself in a life cycle formed, not by fate, by nature or by law, but by the will of conscious beings who, thinking radically new, recreated the world itself and its structures.
So, to summarize, what is art for?
According to these great masters, art is the symbol of the human being's ability to constantly create new contents of thought which, once formed and shared, can build that portion of the unexpected that awaits us beyond the obsolescence of conceptual structures by now in danger.