Luca Bertolo: L’inizio ci assale

With forty works, both recent and previously unseen, displayed on the piano nobile and ground floor of the building, the artist returns to a theme he had already evoked in his painting, adopting the words of a poem by Milo De Angelis: the beginning assails us.

Every beginning requires a little courage and a little surrender, the enthusiasm of an assault and the willingness to be assailed. It is not merely a question of the relationship between the artist and a new work. The beginning is a human dimension of time; it is the constant restarting of the small and great cycles of birth and death, and the emergence and exhaustion of every form of culture.

In Bertolo’s works, art’s perpetual new beginning is reflected in contemporary history, where something tribal seems to have emerged as both a threat and a promise.

Hi work, alongside paintings and drawings, include a series of staffs created over the past two years. These are not elegant walking sticks, but shamanic staffs in which the primitive gesture of smoothing a branch gathered in the woods, turning it into an instrument of war or civilisation, is combined with a wide variety of materials, from animal bones to colourful industrial feather dusters. These staffs possess an indeterminate temporal character. Archaic and postmodern, they stand at the intersection between beginning and end.

During the exhibition, a series of talks with the artist, the curator and other guests will be organised to explore some of the themes related to the project in greater depth.