The Diplomat
On 6 March, the 1st Week of Italian Contemporary Art was inaugurated at the Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid. It is a wide-ranging exhibition program organized on the occasion of the 45th edition of ARCOmadrid, the prestigious International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid. in the presence of the Ambassador of Italy, Giuseppe Buccino Grimaldi, and the Honourable Federico Mollicone, President of the Committee on Culture of the Chamber of Deputies.
The opening, which was attended by Kicco and Paolo Bettinardi for Cracking Art, along with artists Marco Tamburro and Elia Festa, officially opened a week dedicated to contemporary Italian creativity. On this occasion two art installations and an exhibition were presented, transforming the spaces of the Institute -including the facade of the Palace of Abrantes- into places of dialogue and artistic experimentation. The evening was also accompanied by a musical performance of the jazz-flamenco trio Estarperlo, formed by Costanzo Laini (saxophones and clarinet), Ángel Rubio (Spanish guitar) and Héctor Oliveira (double bass), who performed an instrumental repertoire between jazz, flamenco and world music.
Outside and inside the Institute takes shape the installation of Cracking Art, an artistic movement born in 1993 and internationally recognized for its urban installations of animals made from renewable plastic material. The intervention involves the facade of the Palace of Abrantes, where a group of frogs “invades” the architectural space evoking ironically its croar: a background noise that becomes a metaphor for the constant debate that accompanies contemporary art.
In the courtyard of the Institute are presented the site-specific murals of Marco Tamburro, a project dedicated to the universal theme of freedom, whose protagonist is the swing, an iconic and recurring motif in the poetics of the artist who gives title to the work.
As part of the program, the “Spazio Dante” has housed the exhibition Blau by Elia Festa, a Milanese artist active since the late 1970s and known for his photographic research that explores the essentiality of forms and the hidden dimension of reality. In Blau, the artist brings his images into dialogue with water and the fluid element: details of common objects, architectures and lights are reworked to transform themselves into fuzzy and almost kaleidoscopic visions, in which the stability of the figure is deformed and recomposed thanks to the possibilities of technology.
During the opening evening there was also a meeting -reserved for gallery owners, collectors, art critics and journalists from the sector- with Federico Mollicone, president of the Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, together with the collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the gallery owner Francesca Minini. The dialogue addressed some aspects of the proposed law “Italia in scena”, which includes among its legislative innovations important initiatives to support the art market, as well as the reduction of VAT on the sale of works to 5%.
