The Aldo Borgonzoni Archives and Study Centre
accepted with real pleasure the invitation from the Town Hall of Riccione to carry out an exhibition dedicated to the Master at Villa Franceschi, the prestigious seat for the architectural floral plant, dedicated to the “loisir” of the middle-class after the time of Umberto I and for the expository functionality of the Modern and Contemporary Art.
With over sixty works exhibited, coming from
public museums, private institutions and collections, the exhibition is destined to have an important popular role on the Master’s work and to this task is devoting the Archive through its own website that has been active for more than 2
years, with 8.000 contacts.
The filing of the works of Borgonzoni and the selection of unpublished documents about the activity of the artist and his countless relations with the Italian culture and particularly with distinguished art critics such as Francesco Arcangeli, Carlo Bo, Ludovico Ragghianti, Carlo Arturo Quintavalle and Claudio Spadoni are being carried out.
The artistic adventure of the Bolognese Master,
so rooted in the middle of the 20th century, varying between “rouge and noir”, hope and illusions, is a perfect litmus paper in which pictorial research and history get mixed up.
The expressionist fever that since 1935 has guided his paintbrush, proceeding by established cycles and “autre” pauses, interprets many tensions of the 20th century.
From the civil commitment of the Forties to the decline of the rural world, a recurring icon of the
memory, from the urban alienation of the first
Sixties, a fruit of the incipient economic miracle, to the wide fresco about the 2ndVatican Council, from the Virgil’s dream of the Eighties to the deceitful mirrors of the “media” at the end of the century.
Claudio Spadoni who dedicated essays and edited more exhibitions about the artist, included the current one at Villa Franceschi, in 1995 carried out a video-interview with a clear title: “My painting is always a story”. In this one the artist emphasized the need to live the changeable contradictions of reality, supported by the definitely romantic idea
that even a simple painting or a poetry can have influence on the course of the history.
Few other Masters like him investigated with
disenchantment the transformations of the Italian society; in a literary sphere we can remember the cruel and lucid fiction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
This is Aldo Borgonzoni, witness and poet of his
time, that today the public finds out at Villa
Franceschi with an “anthology” of works from the Thirties up to the threshold of 2000 and two sides dedicated to his beloved seascape and a cycle about Virgil, the poet, as genesis of the rural world itself.
Finally we would like to thank very much the
Municipality of Riccione that promoted this exhibition and the Institute of Arts of the Emilia- Romagna Region for the precious technical and scientific contribution and all those committed themselves for the carrying out of the exhibition.
A particular gratitude to Orlando Piraccini, the
co-editor of the preparing arrangement and the catalogue and many thanks also to Daniela Grossi, the institutional coordinator of the exhibition, to the museums, foundations and private collectors of the works and finally to Granarolo Spa, because without its precious contribution it would not have been possible to carry out this important exhibition.
Giambattista Borgonzoni
ALDO BORGONZONI TESTIMONE del TEMPO - Villa Franceschi