Ivana Mulatero – Francesco Poli
SCHERMI DELLE MIE BRAME

Description

The book presents a collection of about seventy works that a couple of Turin collectors brought together during a passionate research on the recent iconography of the television in the visual arts, a legacy in particular of the hegemonic role assumed by the television imagery in today’s society.
The collection was born at the end of the eighties and reaches the present day with the particularity that no work has ever been commissioned directly to the artists. From the point of view of expressive languages, paintings, photographs, drawings, videos and small installations configure the monothematic complexity of the collection, which is counterpointed by the constellation of protagonists of the history of international contemporary art, such as Nam June Paik, Marcel Dzama, Tony Oursler, Joe Tilson, Euan Macdonald, Steven Meek, Martin Noll, Beate Spalthoff, Christian Rainer, Bob & Roberta Smith, Kocheisen Hullmann and William Klein. Alongside them are the exponents of Italian art, starting with the legendary canvases emulsified by Mario Schifano, dated at the end of the sixties, with which the film and television presence “glamorous” the clashes in the French May square. Going up the slope of the years, variants on the cathode box theme are collected offered by Ugo Nespolo, Salvo, Aldo Mondino, Bruno Zanichelli, Luigi Stoisa, Anna Comba, Giorgio Avigdor, Pierluigi Pusole, Ennio Bertrand, Maurizio Vetrugno, Santo Cinalli, Raffaello Ferrazzi, Fausto Gilberti, Enzo Gagliardino, Marco Nereo Rotelli, Giovanna Picciau, Flavio Favelli, Daniele Galliano, GEC, ConiglioViola, Nicus Lucà, Marzia Migliora, Margherita Morgantin, Gabriele Picco, Bostik, Sarah Bowyer, Maria Bruni, Laboratorio Saccardi, Marco Calò, Sergio Cascavilla, Ronald Victor Kastelic, Stefano Pisano, Enrico De Paris, Andrea Mandarino, Claudio Destito, Corrado Porchietti, Ruggero Cosentino di Rondè, Andrea Pozzato, Alessandro Rivoir, Jimmy Rivoltella, Ernesto Cretti, up to and including emerging young people such as Laurina Paperina, Ramona Vada , Ester Viapiano, Andrea Facco, Maria Domenica Rapicavoli, Sara Abbasian, Monica D’Alessandro, Fabio Giorgianni. Many works in the collection depict the television as the subject and object of personal and collective rituals, alongside interior views that give way to settings with clear sociological documentation on the use of the television instrument and at other times replicate in a parodic key the fiction transmitted by the tv / shadow box.
The collection interprets a moment of Italian artistic research which, in the mid-1980s, saw the emergence of a pictorial phenomenon called Medialism, with particular connotations in the Turin area. In the city where Arte Povera was born, two decades later a new pictorial generation grew up in the media sector. The most accredited exponents are all present in the collection with works that are among the most representative of the movement, starting with the pioneering triad composed of Zanichelli, Ferrazzi (now legendary for their promising career that was prematurely interrupted), and Pusole, the only “witness” to his death team and the first young Turin artist to cross the pavilions of the Venice Biennale in June 1990 and with whom Medialism was officially consecrated. To the patrol of the “magnificent three”, who for their training and research turned to the television tool without any academic mediation but passing through fanzines, advertising, urban writing and underground music, are added the signatures of Pisano, De Paris , Cascavilla and Kastelic. As a natural evolution, the television is very often interpreted as a means that communicates not so much and not only images, but also moods, anguish, loneliness and lack of communication, as well as witnessing social episodes and moments of denunciation, up to the point of composing a representation of the family environment, quiet but full of unknowns, as narrated by the works of Laura MacCafferty and Caroline Walker.