ALESSANDRA GIOVANNONI

PIETRE ILLUMINATE

CURATED BY Francesca Bottari

MUSEO NAZIONALE ETRUSCO DI ROCCA ALBORNOZ, VITERBO

FROM DECEMBER 16TH 2023

Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Rocca Albornoz is at its second solo exhibition dedicated to contemporary art. From December 16th 2023 it opens its doors to the canvases and papers of Alessandra Giovannoni, a Roman artist with extensive exhibition experience, active since the late 80s and recognized nationally and internationally.  The exhibition consists in four sections with almost 20 artworks of big dimensions, as well as a rich repertoire of papers, drafts and preparatory sketches. Her more than thirty years figurative experience has shown no interruptions, failures or weakening of her creative vain and stylistic originality. Renowned names of Italian and foreign critics, since her debut at the end of the 80s, have acknowledged Giovannoni’s centrality in the contemporary scene and most important repertoires have included her among the most appreciated artists.

The exhibition in Viterbo was created with the intention of taking stock of the last twenty years of her production, isolating some of her recurring iconographic topoi and reflecting on the sources and developments of this uncontrolled happiness of composition, color and light, of this figurative freedom, of this pictorial culture filled with vitality, feeling of nature and love. The common thread can only be light, which in her paintings is not only natural, but emanated, almost generated: it spreads from the color itself and faces the antagonistic shadow. 

The entrance hall dedicated to the Urban Landscape opens with a selection of large canvases with bright and expanded city views, enlightened by that “royal blue” with which the painter depicts the Roman heat and the summer skies. Giovannoni translates the dazzling beauty of certain views, but also synthesized with a figurative lamp without frills, details or metaphors, all the tragic sense of the existence we experience. 

The monothematic section of Villa Borghese exhibits an enormous triptych from 2010, the location of which will give the visitor the impression of being in the park. Giovannoni has always depicted the Roman villa. There is no lawn, fountain, avenue, sculpture, temple, lake building included in the green area that has not been transfigured on her canvases. The artists, her bicycle and her note sheets are part of Villa Borghese, they are its genius loci.

Viterbo and the stairs. The artist has dedicated to the city that houses her work two paintings that depict the Palace of the Pope from different perspectives: the entrance staircase anche the inner loggia with the fountain with the papal coats of arms. The theme of the staircase, quite unusual in Giovannoni’s production, is represented here by some surprising canvases never shown together, whose glance of leaves enchanted. 

The last exhibition area sees works with walls. In her glimpses of common live observed by the selective and pure sight of the artist, a chipped wall, a drainage pipe or scaffolding can arouse the same interest as a monumental widening or a landscape foreshortening. Walls speak to Giovannoni, and she immobilizes them in dazzling and moving images.

In her painting is the reality of men, nature and things to dictate the story. But then it is the sunlight which creates the volume, the royal blue of the sky, the perspective so expanded that it goes beyond the visual cone, the stirrups of orange and purple trees that cut through the shadow, that block reality in time and space and take on absolute and universal forms. Out of fashions, out of every current, far from any recognizable and classifiable language.