Dal 03/05/2014 al 25/06/2014.

Arnaud Canizares

Curated by Dores Sacquegna

What is beauty today? Do we still need it? Does it still represent a value, an objective or a useful tool for both individuals and contemporary artistic production? The exhibition will be accompanied by an interview by French artist ARNAUD CANIZARES (was born in Toulouse in 1986, he lives and works in Toulouse and Berlin), he is co-founder of AWA a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) for educational images in Berlin, Germany, brought together around this vision of international professionals to spread the ideal of beauty and life education.

The exhibition will show approximately 30 artworks by artists from Italy, France, Venezuela, Mexico, Usa. We would like to present some examples for the radical diversity of approaches by Cosimo BELLANOVA, Arnaud CANIZARES, Oronzo DE STRADIS, Astolfo FUNES , Maria Luisa IMPERIALI, Kamalky LAUREANO Massimiliano MANIERI, Gabriela MORAWETZ, Alessandro PASSARO, Teresa OLABUENAGA, Stuart Ross SNIDER.

In contemporary art, beauty continues to be intellectually suspect, a sort of taboo to both curators and artists. Our world today is, in fact, heir to a long line of philosophical and artistic thought that has forcefully undermined the traditional concept of “beauty in a work of art” and almost totally discredited the “idea of beauty”, deemed a value unsuitable for expressing the feelings of modern man.

Many artists seem to feel a sort of Sehnsucht for beauty, a kind of nostalgia, the yearning for a true aesthetic, transformational, experience felt as a moment of astonishing connection between the individual and the essence of things. Hence the concept fluctuates between two antipodes. On the one hand there is extreme skepticism over the revelation of beauty; and on the other, the endless quest for an ulterior meaning, for beauty felt as a link to the deepest existential sphere of man and his relationship with the world. But how can we describe this experience? And what constitutes and defines its quality and intensity?

Faces hybrids emerging from a light almost in Caravaggio oil painting of Mexican artist KAMALKY LAUREANO ; perfection , representation, transfiguration of the Greek myth of Ares and Artemis in the photographs of COSIMO BELLANOVA , sublime incarnation of the eternal return to the womb with sculpture -installation by MARIA LUISA IMPERIALI . Sensuality , chroma , purity, matter in the paintings of the Venezuelan ASTOLFO FUNES and ALESSANDRO PASSARO . Fetish and sublimation with works by MASSIMILIANO MANIERI, who bares his body showing the peculiar aspect of an aesthetic that goes beyond the technicist conception of beauty and its aspiration to define objective canons . Phenomenalogy of the sublime in the works by ARNAUD CANIZARES , who borrows the securities and the construction of the works of the great Renaissance masters to produce new visions of the contemporary aesthetic , revealing a conception of beauty connected to the deeper existential dimension of man and his relation with the world. From Burke to Kant ‘s conception of the beauty and the sublime stands and opposes broadening the meanings and proper in the ” Critique of Pure Reason ” by Kant , the concept of the sublime is the expression of annihilating power of nature , facing the which man becomes aware of the limit ( sublime dynamic ), while the contemplation of nature and property out of time refers to the mathematical sublime . Both concepts are manifested in the video ” Morocho ” by GABRIELA MORAWETZ , sculpture by STUART ROSS SNIDER , and work on mixed media by TERESA OLABUENAGA , and finally painting the brilliant young italian artist ORONZO DE STRADIS . This exhibition does not claim to treat the subject of beauty exhaustively, but to furnish an occasion for reflection through the vision and the works of artists, differing in their modes of expression, approaches and thematics. It is in fact “an idea”, not “the idea” of beauty.