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A decade ago, in Franco Guerzoni’s studio, a series of works entitled Impossibili restauri took shape; the artist continued to show his interest in the theme for at least two years, crossing other phases and passages marked by different titles, such as Epistola and then, more clearly, Museo ideale. The exhibition illustrated in this book has been conceived from such series, bringing Franco Guerzoni back to Milan after a while. It is not a retrospective show, of course – something Guerzoni invariably avoids – but rather an acknowledgement of the last achievements in his artistic research, perhaps still not enough explored and certainly less talked about than others. A group of artworks illustrating this period are displayed at the Museo del Novecento in dialogue with some of his initial pieces, with the aim of investigating how some ideas and concepts from the origins are, in many respects, still in action.
Martina Corgnati
Franco Guerzoni was born in 1948 in Modena, where he currently lives and works. In the early 1970s he began to use photography as a medium of representation. His first Affreschi date back to 1972; the following year he produced the Archeologie cycle and then Antropologie, an extensive research related to cultural stratification and the idea of “ancient” as loss. In the 1980s he created large paper surfaces that investigate a notion of imaginary geography (Carte di viaggio, Grotteschi, and La parete dimenticata), while at the end of the decade he started researching the dimension of depth. He displayed the cycle Decorazioni e rovine at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Since then, through large cycles of works, he focused his attention on time and the poetry of the ruin – a kind of archaeology without restoration.
In 2006, following the rediscovery of a group of photography-based works dating back to the 1970s, he displayed at GAM in Turin his Paesaggi in polvere. From then on, his investigations have always been accompanied by a veritable activity of reconnection and/or transfer – from the painting to the wall. This is his ancient dream, the constant focus of all his work: the creation of a sort of bas-relief, an idea of sculpture that comes directly from inside the wall. The Parete dimenticata has thus become the privileged place of his current work.
