Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in collaboration with Fondazione Baruchello presents at Villa Farnesina in Rome the exhibition Gianfranco Baruchello. Mondi possibili, curated by Carla Subrizi, in conjunction with the International Conference of Studies on the artist’s work to be held on 23 and 24 January 2025 at Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Both events are part of the initiatives for the centenary of the birth of Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno 1924 – Rome 2023).
The exhibition, in an itinerary that winds its way through the indoor and outdoor spaces of Villa Farnesina, proposes, with a selection of works by Gianfranco Baruchello, a long-distance dialogue between history, iconography and imagery belonging to different eras. Art and history open up to a confrontation not only between past and present, but also between inspiration and creation, possibility and the unreal.
In the words of the curator: “Mondi Possibili are thus configured when time loses its articulation: sequences are interrupted, the past arrives to surprise us and the present is realised as an incursion into the already state. The interaction between works does not only produce encounters but forms of questioning between phases and epochs, between models of history and their consequences: past and present – and not only ancient and contemporary, terms in a certain sense closed in on themselves – find new and effective ways of dialogue. The Mondi Possibili are created by relating experiences, stories, memory, to produce short circuits: a premise that has always been present in Baruchello’s research”.
History, the unconscious, the dream and the environment, themes that are all present in the fresco cycles of the Villa Farnesina, have been continuously investigated by Baruchello and return in this exhibition, with eight large works, through a variety of media, including painting, object, installation and moving image.
Gianfranco Baruchello, with his radical and independent work spanning seven decades between the 20th and 21st centuries, has often stated that his entire oeuvre has been an attempt to build ‘small systems’ capable of counteracting the large systems of history, politics and ideology.
What happens if a 20th century artist, Gianfranco Baruchello, meets Raphael? If the nymph Galatea, a work by Raphael in the frescoes of the Loggia of the same name, finds before her the path of a river (Il Fiume, 1983) thought of by an artist who lived 500 years later as a winding path, full of obstacles? If Raphael thinks of Galatea through Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Baruchello is self-referring to the course of a river that, in its articulation, discovers the difficulty of flowing, of being what it should be, due to alterations in the balance of both natural (environmental, geographical, social) and lived experience.
The other works in the exhibition also dialogue with the rooms of Villa Farnesina Museum. Nomadic and fragile houses (A House in Iron Wire, 1975, in the Hall of Frieze); monuments to those who have been forgotten by history (Monument to Non-Heroes, 1962, in the Hall of the Wedding of Alexander the Great and Roxane); stratifications, both temporal and spatial, of the complexity of the pictorial cycles of the Villa Farnesina captured in the reduced size of a not very large space (Oh, Rocky Mountains Columbine, 1966, in the Sala Pompeiana); gazes that from history continue to look at us and question us (La storia ci guarda, 1972-2018, Stanza 4); openable objects that show the unconscious, memory and territories of the psyche yet to be explored (Murmur. Without Breaks, 2015, in the Lodge of Cupid and Psyche); a Garden of very beautiful and seductive plants that turn out to pose a danger (Giftpflanzen, Gefahr!/ Poisonous Plants, Danger! 2009, site-specific installation in the historic gardens of the Villa).
The exhibition has the patronage and support of Associazione Amici dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.