In an article published in the Lacerba magazine in 1914, Ardengo Soffici indicated Giorgio de Chirico's painting as "a writing of dreams". This definition has resisted over time the love-hate of a large part of the critics: the Pictor Optimus has never given up the habit of amazement through an art that, beyond the diatribes, has aroused philosophical, literary and psychoanalytical implications.
The exhibition, promoted in collaboration with the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation and embellished with a large body of works from important international museums, offers an ideal journey made of unpublished comparisons and unrepeatable combinations that reveal the fantastic world of one of the most complex artistic figures. of the twentieth century. The exhibition itinerary offers the access key to a complex and hermetic painting that has its roots in the Greece of the artist's childhood, matured in the Paris of the avant-gardes, gives life to the metaphysics that bewitches the surrealists and in its last season conquers Andy Warhol creating havoc with his irreverent as well as ironic reinterpretations of the Baroque.
Divided into eight sections, the exhibition aims to be an articulated narrative that crosses the de Chirico-metaphysical association to offer a new reading of his work through unusual combinations, not necessarily chronological but emotional, in an exhibition itinerary that, architecturally, recalls deceptions and the space-time overlaps of the master's paintings, including sudden windows, labyrinths, false perspective planes and sharp angles. Here then is that muses, argonauts, gladiators, mannequins and philosophers attract the viewer, now hiding now revealing the most remote corners of the poetics of an artist who, even though through different formal phases, "was only and always metaphysical".
De Chirico (1888-1978) is a son of his time: having lost faith in realism, he tries to go beyond mere objective representation, to give voice to interior landscapes as the Impressionists had already done, relying on nature perceived through the subjectivity of the senses . The artists of the new century take the lesson and go further, reinventing the subject in search of hidden meanings. Symbolists, surrealists, metaphysicians are united by the new gaze on reality, which takes on different forms. For the latter, and for de Chirico in particular, the sense of reality comes "after" the real itself, and passes through the overcoming of objectivity.
We are witnessing the application of metaphysical laws to man; via anthropomorphism, the human figure loses its identity and finds new ones: mannequin, automaton in an intermediate state between being and object, in a now automated society.
A splendid example of this new dimension of painting is the painting Disquieting Muses of 1925. The dominant theme is that of an immobile and mysterious eternity, which prevails over the appearance of things and induces, in a magical atmosphere of dreamlike vision, to question oneself. on their ultimate meaning, on the reason for their existence. The square, scene of the painting, paved with boards, resembles a stage with the castle of Ferrara as its backdrop and a factory with chimneys, a metaphor for present-past bipolarity, empty and unused structures. The protagonists of the scene are the muses, whom the artist defines disturbing because he delegates to them the dialogue with the mystery, with the truth beyond appearance, with a reality free from time and space, in controversy with a concept of modernity that denies the values of the past. De Chirico transforms them into mannequins: the one in the foreground, thanks to the vertical folds of the dress, seems on the point of metamorphosing into a Greek column, while the other, in the background, seated, has his head disassembled and resting on the ground, similar to a mask that polemically alludes to the Negrism dear to Pablo and to all the avant-garde currents that de Chirico has always rejected.
Almost thirty years later, de Chirico painted Self-portrait in the park as a counterbalance to this masterpiece, a staging of himself, unconventional and absolutely outside any recognizable current, period or style, with a blatantly ironic and provocative: aimed at surprising as all his painting has always done.
