Carlo Guarienti - La realtà del sogno

Carlo Guarienti "The Reality of the Dream" at the Castello Estense, from 29 October 2022 to 22 January 2023
On show more than 100 works by the artist, among the greats of the 20th century

"A work should not be explained.
It must be observed, admired, experienced. 
Those who try to talk about their works, 
who claim to explain them,
are not artists, but tell stories"
Carlo Guarienti

Carlo Guarienti is 99 years old and, in Ferrara, we decided to celebrate him with a huge exhibition hosted in the splendid rooms of the Castello Estense.
Born in Treviso in 1923, he has been an original protagonist of the national and European art scene for over half a century. An extraordinary artist for an exhibition that will offer over one hundred artworks, including paintings and sculptures, through which you will be able to discover the artist's wide-ranging and articulated career, marked by a constant process of metamorphosis. 

After his debut with the group 'I pittori della realtà' (Reality Painters) in 1949, the artist's language veered towards the fantastic and visionary, as evidenced by works such as 'Nascita di una natura morta' (1956). In the 1960s he experimented with a technique borrowed from the tearing of frescoes and based on the use of peeling plaster, cracks, collage and a synthetic resin mixed with colour and sand. Later, after elaborating a surrealist bestiary inspired by Max Ernst and Aloys Zötl, he became a painter of mental geometries, of pure, two-dimensional or solid forms organised in rigorous perspective spaces. Since the 1980s, he has painted numerous still lifes, set in suspended atmospheres between reality and unreality. Irreducible experimenter, Guarienti's articulate and complex poetics is also expressed in his plastic production - characterised by a powerful formal synthesis between archaic models and 20th-century suggestions - and in his engraving art.

Tempted by countless stimuli, Guarienti's work points in the direction of a realism based on thought, on abstract concepts that translate into images, more or less enigmatic, suspended between dream and reality. As Vittorio Sgarbi has pointed out, in his works "we find exactly what metaphysical painting wanted to represent, right from its beginnings, with De Chirico's research. An essential dimension of pure thought, which comes to distil and therefore to distance emotionality. Purely mental painting." 

From an idea by Vittorio Sgarbi. Selection of works curated by Pietro Di Natale, Vasilij Gusella and Stefano Sbarbaro. Organised by Fondazione Ferrara Arte and the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara, with the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region.