Fermi tutti is the title of a show, curated by Giorgio Cortenova and Patrizia Nuzzo, which will be opening on 20 June in the Palazzo Forti gallery of modern art. Looked forward to for some time by both the public and critics, the exhibition is devoted to the work of Roberto Barni, an internationally famous artist born in Pistoia in 1939. Two of his sculptures already belong to the museum’s collection, and other works by him are to be found in such prestigious public collections as the Gabinetto dei Disegni e Stampe in the Uffizi, Florence, the Queen’s Museum, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London.
In the frescoed rooms of Palazzo Forti, painting will meet up with sculpture to create a haunting and magical environment with some seventy works mostly created between 2000 and 2008: an overview of the poetics of an artist which demonstrates how Barni, since the ‘seventies - a time in Italy and the rest of the world dominated by Conceptual and Minimal art – has continued to develop his own original and autonomous language.
His main interest is in the figure of man in all his precariousness, balanced on the edge of the world, a wayfarer who does not accept current ideas and cannot bear the areas he is confined to: a drifter “anxious to know without letting himself be known”.
Some forty paintings were realised specifically for this exhibition and are metaphorical spaces from which enigmatically emerges the dimension of time. These are figures with elegant and stylised lines which, in their simplicity, evoke fourteenth century, Tuscan melancholy, also as a result of the colour which give free rein to greys, earth colours, and pinks juxtaposed to the primaries of which Barni is a master.
In his most recent sculptures, slender bronze figures of men - quiet self-absorbed clairvoyants – are the protagonists of a world where paradox creates a poetic and metaphysical place.
Not just the sculpture but the painting and the literature of the Twentieth Century have traced an outline of these, apparently insensitive, new heroes, figures who stretch out their hands while standing on the edge of a container, around a table, or who face each other from the extremities of a seesaw. They never meet but ironically oppose their different rhythms.
It is in this very meeting of enigmatic and contradictory components, this musically constructive counterpoint, that is revealed the tragicomic essence of Barni’s figures, the condition of contemporary mankind.
Barni’s art, by way of the lightest humour, suggests various thoughts about today’s society in which whatever is accidental and provisory becomes an unchangeable existential status.
Barni’s world is commented on in the catalogue, published by Marsilio, by Alberto Boatto, Giorgio Cortenova, and Alberto Fizz, together with full documentation and photographs which reveal the beauty of the gallery spaces, ideal for hosting the painting and sculpture of a master like Roberto Barni.
