Until 10 May, the Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid, under the auspices of the Italian Embassy in Spain, in collaboration with GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin and the Fondazione Torino Musei, presents the exhibition Behind the work. Giulio Paolini and Luca Bertolo.
Curated by Elena Volpato, the exhibition is a score for two voices in counterpoint. Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940) and Luca Bertolo (Milan, 1968) have different tones. The first crystalline, vocalic, is expressed in his works with exact notes. The second versatile, of punchy texture, joins the execution of head to that of diaphragm. Since the 1960s, Paolini has been analysing art, painting and image in their enigmatic nature. Bertolo, since the nineties, redirects painting towards a renewed sense of the image, making the picture a space that can not be decided between thought and expression.
Their journeys, however far away, are unexpectedly crossed at more points, around themes that mark three times of the exhibition, one for each room of the Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid: the sense of the canvas, the ambiguous image status of the flag and the representation of absence.
Through a dialogue of works -chosen among the most representative of the two authors- made up of reverse canvases, installations, paintings and photographic images, the exhibition covers a time span of sixty years, from 1963 to 2024, the time needed for two generations to be observed, answered and perhaps understood.
