The man who measures the clouds (1998) is rearranged on the terrace of the Madre museum, curated by Laura Trisorio, Melania Rossi and Andrea Viliani as part of the Per_forming a collection project, and presented at the same time as the Sensitive encounters project at the Capodimonte Museum, curated by Sylvain Bellenger and Laura Trisorio. The work is inspired by the statement that the ornithologist Robert Stroud made at the moment of his release from Alcatraz prison, when he declared that from now on he would be dedicated to "measuring the clouds". In addition to the quotation, which places the work in a defined historical and scientific context, in this case the use of the self-portrait has a further biographical reference, as the work is a tribute to the younger brother of the artist, a dreamer died prematurely. The staging of a memorial absence that imposes itself as a sculptural presence becomes the metaphorical double of both the represented personalities, whose union generates an inter-individual energy that becomes vital movement, despite the static nature of the sculptural form. Also expressing the feeling of planning the impossible (precisely the attempt to measure a changeable and inconstant entity like clouds), Fabre reflects on the very status of the artist's research, assimilated to the scientist's claim to go beyond the human limit of knowledge. As an artist and researcher Fabre constantly tries, in effect, to "measure the clouds", admitting and declaring with his work that the tension towards knowledge has insurmountable limits which, however, it is possible to approach and tackle precisely through experimentation, in which express the inexpressible without betraying, as the artist himself declares, the intrinsic and foundational human and universal beauty.

From 1958 to 1968, Fontana created the cycles of cuts, Concepts of Space and Waiting, in which, as in the work in the collection, the single or repeated tearing of the canvas determines the timelessness of the sign and the contamination between the space of the work and the of the environment that surrounds it. This new measure of the space of the work, which no longer coincides with the traditional idea of separating the canvas from reality, is further investigated in the Fine di Dio series (1963-1964), in which oval canvases, where sequins are sometimes affixed , are punctuated by holes and lacerations, in the Teatrini (1964-1966), in which figurative elements also appear, and in the Ellissi (1967), elliptical tables in which the holes are made by machine. In 1966 the artist won the prize at the Venice Biennale with a personal room, where he created, in collaboration with Carlo Scarpa, a labyrinthine oval environment illuminated by white light and punctuated by white canvases crossed by a cut. An extensive documentation of proposals and projects attest to the relationship between Fontana and the gallery owner Lucio Amelio, in view of the organization of an exhibition that was never realized due to the artist's death, who had exhibited for the first time in Naples with a solo show at the gallery. The Center in 1963.

Having moved permanently to Rome since the late 1950s, Kounellis made his debut with large paintings in which he outlines words, letters, numbers, directional signs that stand out on monochrome surfaces welcoming the visual signals of the urban context in the context of pictorial languages. Starting from the end of the 1960s, his analysis of the relationship between the structure of artistic practice and the sensitivity of existence and historical consciousness expresses with great lyrical pathos the tension and alienation of contemporary society and the fragmentation of debate and cultural production, resulting in the elaboration of a personal and revolutionary artistic language as in the famous work with twelve live horses at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome in 1969 and in the large installations that use natural elements or objects that refer to everyday life such as real people and live animals , stones, succulents, the fire given off by oxyhydrogen flames, carded wool, coffee powder, jute bags empty or filled with grains, fragments of copies of classical sculptures, oil lamps, iron shelves and rails. In the installation created especially for the Madre, the room dedicated to him is blocked longitudinally by a large iron structure, which lets the light shine through monochrome colored glass, like a contemporary and critical version of the windows of the great Gothic cathedrals and of the centrality of the role of art in their time. A large rusty anchor rests its weight, even metaphorical, on the floor, creating a chain of references to the historical role of Naples overlooking the sea and its representation in the history of art, not only in the local area.

Anish Kapoor, Dark Brother, 2005. Courtesy Donnaregina Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Naples. Photo © Amedeo Benestante.Among the protagonists of English sculpture of the eighties, Anish Kapoor with the pigments drawn from the Indian decorative tradition of the Mille Nomi series, with stones or large concave structures, with his mirrored metal sculptures, oscillates with results excellent between solidity and transparency, between geometric and organic, between full and empty, redefining and expanding the concept of sculpture in art. His poetics implodes and at the same time intensifies and deepens the binary relationships, the opposite energies, the antitheses that constitute the visible world and abstract thought through a vision that, never narrative or didactic, coagulates and harmonizes the dynamic tension and the subtle interaction between forces, corporeality and antithetical features. Light and shadow, negative and positive, masculine and feminine, material and immaterial, internal and external, full and empty, concave and convex, shiny and opaque, smooth and rough, natural and artificial, rigid and soft, solid and liquid, active and inert, and ultimately order and disorder, are but some of the polarities which concretize the sensitive universe and which, activated and forged in the synoptic potential and sensuality of the form, metaphor and metabolize the mystery of life by induction. In the hollow on the floor of his room at the Madre, Kapoor, with a great displacement effect, conveys the viewer's gaze towards infinity and towards the bowels of mother earth.

Pistoletto's path began in the mid-fifties; starting from the first mirror paintings of 1962, mirror-polished steel plates on which life-size tissue paper figures appear, and passing through the Plexiglass (1964) and the Minus Objects (1965-66), Pistoletto's works qualify for the incessant experimentation, beyond a defined technique or style, and at the same time, for the progressive integration of the spectator and the space-time of reality in the work, first through the reflecting surfaces of the mirror paintings, then in the real confrontation with the fewer Objects, precisely objects - and not sculptures - that “do not represent but are” - says the artist, announcing a turning point in a theatrical key, of active and direct involvement, in his research. In Venere degli stracci, from 1967, the assembly technique, the apparently provocative combination, brings together the classic reference to the poor material par excellence, the rag, initially used to clean mirror paintings, and now used in its material and chromatic component . The colored shreds of cloth are arranged to form a gap between the reproduction of Venus with an apple by the neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and the wall towards which the sculpture, lost both authoritative frontality and prestige of workmanship (it is an industrial and serial cast), seems address, suggesting an unprecedented capacity for recycling and regeneration, between order and chaos, classicism and modernity.

The most significant and innovative aspects of Jeff Koons' work are the method and tools with which he addressed the fundamental issues in contemporary culture and art: from materialism to consumerism, from the concept of power to that of art itself. From the latest models of vacuum cleaners in the display cases of the early Eighties to the wooden or porcelain compositions of characters or stereotypes of cinema, songs, children's objects or souvenirs, from mirrors to the latest large paintings that assemble images from the world of fashion to that of toys and fast food, Koons re-elaborates and revolutionizes the modernist tradition of the past century, using and renewing the legacy of Duchamp's ready-mades, Dada and Pop art. His work aspires to "communicate with the masses" through a visual vocabulary extrapolated from commercial advertising and the entertainment industry, pushing the boundary between artistic language and popular culture to the extreme. The large canvases on the walls of the Madre, reminiscent of the great narrative cycles in the frescoes of the past, critically reinterpret the practice and dynamics of the media of our time through the tradition of art.

Beuys by Warhol, the work that became part of the museum's collection, was created by the American artist in 1980, and is part of a series of portraits of the great German artist that Warhol conceived on the occasion of the meeting between the two artists , which took place in Naples on the initiative of the gallery owner Lucio Amelio. A figure of fundamental importance for international contemporary art, in 1965 Lucio Amelio opened his Modern Art Agency in Naples, exhibiting the works of the most innovative artists of those years, including Beuys and Warhol, becoming a place for debate and research , as a meeting point between internationally renowned artists who are also very different from each other. The political, philosophical, symbolic and radical nature of Beuys's work constituted, in those years, one of the most important experiences of conceptual art of a social matrix, but it was profoundly distant from Warhol's investigation into the society of mass consumption and on the media cult of celebrity. The diversity of these two visions made even more striking, in the eyes of the art world of those years, the encounter made possible by the charismatic personality of Amelio, of which the Beuys by Warhol cycle is perhaps the most extreme outcome. The series of portraits that Warhol dedicates to Beuys is centered on a photograph that, if well captures the psychological intensity and acumen of the German artist's thought (with the result of producing a portrait very distant from the usual images of celebrities which he is linked to the name of Warhol), is furthermore subjected to the silkscreen flattening and the chromatic variation in several versions usual for the artist. A work that is both personal and serial, the comparison, then as now very topical, between American art and European art.

The canvas becomes an open field of possibilities, adherence to reality no longer passes through figuration but takes shape starting from the study of the phenomena of perception. Characteristic of Bonalumi's work is the creation of everted canvases, with the insertion of supports, in wood and metal, which determine their shapes. The artist thus obtains vibrating surfaces, whose shape changes in relation to the incidence of light and the point of view. The two-dimensional surface flexes acquiring a three-dimensional dimension, the accent is placed on the optical-perceptive illusion, which makes the work iridescent. The play of light and shadow is no longer obtained through the chromatic variations but thanks to the modulations of the structure itself. For these works we speak of "painting-object" - using the definition of the critic Gillo Dorfles - for their ability to hold together the languages of painting and sculpture, stimulating a tactile experience: the starting point is always the canvas, but this extends to the surrounding space, establishing a direct relationship with the environment and the viewer. The next step is the overcoming of the dimension of the picture and the landing on the painting-environment, with interventions in which it is the painting that adapts to the space: emblematic in this sense is the work created by Bonalumi for the exhibition The space of the image in Foligno in 1967, the occasion in which the artist presents Blu Habitable, an installation created with a series of panels with everted structures that invade the spectator's space, inviting him to “inhabit” the work. Bonalumi's work in the collection is dated to 1974, the same one in which the Il Centro gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to "Azimuth" in Naples, with works by Bonalumi, Castellani and Manzoni. The painting is part of a corpus of works created in the seventies, in which white cancels any reference to the image to free the underlying form. The rational subdivision of the surface comes into tension with the play of light generated by the regularity of the relief pattern, letting ideal form and sensory suggestion meet, conceptual input and aesthetic research.

The work in the collection belongs to the famous series of Vibratory Textured Surfaces (1972-74) that play on the ambiguity of vision. The subtle changes generated by the refraction of light, thanks to the compositional texture of the aluminum surfaces, activate their intrinsic dynamism and the risk of interaction with the viewer, making it a fragment of Alviani's complex Weltanschauung, based on the stimulation of new operating methods and various expressive possibilities linked to the phenomenal and ideological insights connected to optical-visual problems. Testimony of a research path as rigorous on a theoretical level as it is precise in formal developments, which is similar to the historical experience of the Bauhaus and to artists such as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Konrad Wachsmann to lead to the Kinetic and Programmed Art movement of which Alviani is one of the most precocious and lucid interpreters. Alviani's association with the gallery Il Centro di Dina Caròla dates back to 1966, at the time of the Confrontate Trends exhibition. Visual Art and Object Figuration in comparison, curated by Filiberto Menna and Alberto Boatto, and continued uninterrupted over the years (the first solo exhibition in 1972, the last in 2007). The exhibition activity of the Neapolitan gallery soon directs its interests towards all the researches related to a scientific experience of vision, presenting, over the years, by Alviani, exhibitions of historical masters such as Josef Albers or Max Bill, of exponents of the Kinetic and Programmed Art such as Gianni Colombo, Enzo Mari, François Morellet, Jesus Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely, Luigi Veronesi, or historical exponents of Group T and Group N such as Edoardo Landi and Manfredo Massironi.

In his works the forces at play materialize and rebalance, creating an effect of dynamism in power, as in Untitled (1968), a structure with a life of its own thanks to the fact that a head of lettuce, consuming itself, determines the displacement of the block. of granite to which it is precariously secured (as in a similar work the water contained in a metal structure tends to escape, drunk from the cotton that is partially immersed in it). Organic and inorganic, natural and technological, hot and cold, light and heavy are some of the dialectical pairs on which the artist works; the coexistence and conciliation of opposite materials and phenomena extends on a conceptual level, where Anselmo investigates the relationship between finite and infinite, visible and invisible. From the early Eighties the use of ultramarine blue appears in his works, which defines a horizon, the borderline between the earthly condition and a condition elsewhere, invisible, almost spiritual: "most of reality is invisible and things are visible to give us the possibility to deduce the invisible ”, says the artist, who in 1990 won the Golden Lion for painting at the Venice Biennale with his stone canvases, an extreme synthesis of potentially opposing elements. From these reflections the work Invisible (2007) is also born, which once again contains a dialectic of opposites: a block of black granite, perfectly smooth and pure in its geometric shape, appears truncated, cut on one side. The missing piece assumes the absence of the particle "in", which transforms the invisible word (title of the work) into visible (the graffiti written on the work). The heaviness of the material is confronted with the intangibility of the word; the immobility of the stone, its finiteness, opens up to the incommensurability of the infinite and the invisible that surrounds it. With an essential gesture, Anselmo alludes to the possibility of finding completion in what we do not see, bringing the sphere of the sensible to that of the intellect, matter with the imagination, the human microcosm with the universal macrocosm.

Line and color become the cornerstones around which his production in recent years revolves: while maintaining a strong visual assonance with the primary structures of Minimal Art, Piacentino's works differ from the works of American artists for their "artisanal" nature, renouncing to use the industrial prefabricated building proposed by colleagues from overseas. In fact, these are lacquered wood structures, often reproduced in similar shapes but made different from each other by the use of color, obtained by drawing on a personal sample of over three hundred color variations. From one shade to another, the chromatic choice connotes the work and makes it a unique piece, insisting on its optical-perceptive value and on the ambiguity between real object and "mental" object. The artist states in an interview in 1972: "I like to invent on the usual things. I made them in inhuman, absurd dimensions; in them there is always a sense of uselessness, decoration and invention [...]. It was a work of softening the form, more typical of the furniture maker than the sculptor ”. The starting point is the frame, an instrument still linked to the pictorial language, which Piacentino isolates as an element as such, creating objects that simultaneously enclose the support and the pictorial surface. "From this naively cultured idea of disassembling the frame - which I enjoyed coloring - I then moved on to an expansion of a part of it into the environment", says the artist. Dark Prussian-Blue Portal IV, which belongs to the works created between 1966 and 1967, presents itself as a hypothetical access door, drawing, measuring and delimiting a portion of the exhibition space with which it interacts. Abstract forms that look at concrete objects, "furniture" devoid of functionality (as Tommaso Trini defines them), Piacentino's works propose a synthesis of architecture, sculpture, painting, looking at design but preserving a self-referential nature that remains firm on the line, the color, the size, the positioning. Reconciling the geometric essentiality and the materiality of the object, the artist works on the gap between the idea of form and its materialization in space, keeping high the tension between the intuition of the image and its physicality, as well as in subsequent series of Vehicles, purely ideal and therefore dysfunctional means of transport, created starting from 1969.

A protagonist since the late seventies of the Transavantgarde, theorized by Achille Bonito Oliva, Francesco Clemente has subsequently developed an increasingly solitary and innovative artistic profile that has increased his fame and international success. Over the course of his career, he has gone through, developed, abandoned and then resumed themes, obsessions (e.g. sex), techniques and formats at irregular intervals with the casual incoherence of an inner monologue, with the unpredictable cadence of the flow of consciousness of the individual, apex and origin of his work. After the retrospective in October 2003 at the National Museum, which marked Clemente's return to Naples, a native city in which he had never exhibited his work, the artist created a fresco of monumental proportions for the Mother, divided into two salt, and a ceramic floor, retracing the ancient places and symbols of Naples with the memory of childhood.

The new commission for the museum's collection was designed to be placed on the terrace, which dominates the surrounding district of San Lorenzo at 360 degrees, up to Vesuvius and the sea, barely visible in the distance. The sea does not wet Naples, right from its title, cites that of the book published by Anna Maria Ortese in 1953, a collection of short stories that returns the difficulties, the drama and the suffering of post-war Naples with a critical, sometimes merciless, gaze. The apparently absurd statement hides a bitter reflection: where the sea is synonymous with openness and possibility, then Naples cannot be bathed by the same waters that offer a way of escape and redemption. Bianco-Valente takes up this painful assumption, showing its most paradoxical aspect: from the terrace it is in fact visible, even if in the distance, the same sea that the phrase denies, activating a short circuit between meaning and signifier. The words that make up the writing are made of iron: the discontinuity of the surface, left in its raw state but covered by a generous layer of paint that will be taken up every year by the artists, reinforces the roughness of the words and refers to a state of tension that has never been resolved. , difficult to "smooth out" but, for this reason, dramatically authentic.

Axer / Désaxer. Work in situ, 2015, MADRE, Naples - # 2 consists of an intervention of architectural dimensions, conceived by the artist specifically for the museum atrium. Facing oblique with respect to the street in front, the museum building is "rotated" by the artist's intervention to re-align itself towards the opposite Via Settembrini: through 8.7 cm strips of black and white marble (one of the recurring features of the artist's in situ interventions) the floor of the entrance suggests an unprecedented escape route and a potential perspective axis rectilinear to the road axis, making the museum go out of itself to embrace the city around, while a pavilion-structure, composed of colored surfaces and mirrors, reverberates and enhances this new imaginary axonometry. In this way the artist acts on the viewer's point of view, creating a space of perceptual and cognitive mobility, of vision, mediation, mutual attraction and communion, in which interior and exterior, museum and community interpenetrate one another. , until they become confused with each other. Each visitor is thus welcomed and invited, literally at a glance, to be part of the work, to actively participate in the relationship that it celebrates between the institutional sphere and public dynamics. The work thus becomes a real public celebration of the museum and all its visitors, both integral and collaborating elements of the concept of work in situ. Inscribe the works in the context in which they are exhibited, relate to the social mission that motivates the museum institution, contrast a modernity that does not seek contrast with the urban sphere or the historical dimension, but enhances its matrix: this is the meaning of the work .

Léa Lublin, “Untitled”, 1977 (detail). Private collection, Naples. On loan to Madre · Donnaregina contemporary art museum, Naples. Photo © Amedeo Benestante. | Léa Lublin, “Untitled,” 1977 (detail). Private collection, Naples. On loan to Madre · Donnaregina contemporary art museum, Naples. Photo © Amedeo Benestante After moving with her family to Argentina, Léa Lublin (Poland, 1929 - Paris, 1999) attended the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires between 1941 and 1949, beginning to explore a distant pictorial language both from realism and from the geometric abstraction of Concrete Art. The experience of studying in Paris, starting in 1952, with Gustave Singier at the Académie Ranson, put her in contact with the young French painters of the period. However, it was after his return to America that his research changed radically, opening in the following decade to a new research itinerary. In fact, since the mid-1960s, Lublin has gone beyond the two-dimensionality of the canvas to open up also to various media solutions, in particular on the performance, environmental and video sides, in which the participatory request of the public and the overcoming of the boundaries between art and life. Back in Paris, and strongly influenced by feminism, the artist works on the perceptions of behavioral and relational models in art and in everyday life. In one of his first performances in Paris, Mon Fils from 1968, he transforms the environment of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris into a domestic space where he takes care of his seven-month-old son, identifying social life and the 'gender identity as privileged coordinates of his own work, while since the end of the decade he has also created sensory and participatory environments (Terranauts, 1969). - including Polilogo Exterior from 1974, an imaginary dialogue between the artist, his gallery owner, a critic and a writer, and the Interrogations surarte project, begun in 1974 and completed in the 1990s - and disciplinary crossings, always carried out in the a sign of a dimension of artistic commitment and constant attention to the theme of individual and collective memory: Presente suspendido. Marcel Duchamp in Buenos Aires 1919-1991. Objets perdus / Objets trouvés. In line with this research, in 1977, Lublin, on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Lucio Amelio Gallery (Dante's hand or the screen), created some aphorisms on art on fabric (Untitled, 1977), which he installs on the walls of the gallery but which also disseminates in the open space, from the external gate of Villa Pignatelli to the base of the poet's statue in Piazza Dante, involving space and public dynamics in his own questions about meaning, consciously multiple and intimately relational, of doing artistic.

The work in the collection, L'amore, suggests from the title the aspiration of the sculpture to those that are properly human feelings: based on the purity of the elements that compose it, in silent dialogue with each other, the work contains an allusive sensuality, thanks to which the abstract forms acquire an unexpected corporeality. As in many of Melotti's other works, light plays a crucial role in animating and transforming surfaces, becoming the junction point between idea and matter, rationality and imagination, visible and invisible, process and final outcome. In 1971, the same year in which the work was created, Italo Calvino wrote about Melotti's work in the book The restless space, underlining the "vibrant immobility" of his sculptures, an expression that also perfectly describes Love as a combination of ideal aspiration and tension. vital. The linguistic versatility of Melotti and his multifaceted activity were at the center of the anthological exhibition that the Madre museum dedicated to the artist in 2011.

The five wall-drawings by Sol LeWitt (Hartford, 1928-New York, 2007), entitled Scribbles, were specially made in this room for the Sol LeWitt exhibition. The artist and his artists in 2012, after which they joined the collection of the Madre museum as a long-term loan from the LeWitt Collection. Selected, designed by the artist in 2007 and never performed before, the five wall drawings belong to the last cycle to which LeWitt dedicated himself. They adopt the black pencil of the first wall-drawings of the seventies but, unlike then, not to make the drawing "as two-dimensional as possible" but, on the contrary, to detach it from the wall in the most illusionistic way through skeins of more or less dense signs and chiaroscuro. As established in the handbook of wall drawings drawn up by LeWitt in 1970, the design of the work is the prerogative of the artist while its realization is entrusted to the assistants who, while strictly following his instructions, inevitably make each drawing different from the other. For the exhibition in Naples, a specialized designer sent by the LeWitt Collection, assisted by young local assistants, was working on the walls of the museum to create the work in relation to the very architecture of the room that now houses them permanently.

The first installation, presented in June-December 2013 as part of the Per_formare una Collezione # 1 exhibition, was dedicated to the theme and technique of montage, a fundamental aspect of Baruchello's entire work and which also extends to the areas of painting and assembly. In the video News in two minutes (2008), the camera scrolls the entire content of an issue of "Il Corriere della Sera" within two minutes. The inspiration comes from the homonymous title of the column on the last page of the newspaper, in which the most important news of the day is reported in a summarized form: the work assumes as a compositional principle the imperative of a fast and syncopated consumption of news, and it constitutes a comment on the accelerated perception of time and reality. The film Disperse Exclamatory Phase is screened in the second room, made between 1964 and 1965 in collaboration with Alberto Grifi. Verification uncertain is a work based on a radical use both of pre-existing material and of the editing technique and has anticipated by years the appropriation and sampling practices that have become popular since the end of the seventies. The film is made up of cinematic waste material, over 150,000 meters of film from American commercial cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s destined for waste and which Baruchello mounted with adhesive tape. Images and sequences from different narratives are juxtaposed in order to create suspensions and inversions of the original scripts, with the result of obtaining the opposite of the classic film writing process: here the screenplay is the result of the editing and not the starting point. The part of the title in brackets (Disperse Exclamatory Phase) refers to the project - later not realized - to disperse, at the end of the first screening, the frames by donating them to the public, in order to re-distribute the appropriate material again. Presented in 1965 at the Gruppo 63 conference in Palermo, this film is a fundamental work in the context of those practices which - as we can also see through the work of Nanni Balestrini - question the concept of author and analyze the mechanisms of creation through the appropriation and re-invention of existing materials.

One of his first significant works is Geometrical Drawing of 1960: a canvas on which he has completed only a preliminary procedure, that is the geometric quadrature, an anticipation of every possible representation. Paolini's works are always focused on specific themes of art and progressively inherent in increasingly vast areas that subtract the uniqueness of the work to give it the possibility of alluding to infinite possible existences. A sample of the tools and techniques of painting and drawing of the years 1960-64 appears in the paintings (cans of paint, brushes, frames, preparation of the canvas, grid). Often his works reproduce the image of themselves within the space that hosts them. The reflections on the concept of action are generally derived from textual grafts: works reproduced in photographs, paintings by other artists, plaster casts, ancient prints and literary passages. While in exhibition projects, the relationship between the works and the exhibition space or the behavior that the viewer assumes inside it is analyzed, as in the installation created specifically for the Madre.

The texts that the artist chooses for the erasing operation are initially excerpts from newspapers, on which he intervenes by deleting the words of the text and leaving only a few, selected words legible. In this way the semantic fabric of the original text is modified and radically re-interpreted, bringing out meanings extraneous to the original text. In those years Isgrò seems to want to work on syntax and meaning, in a certain sense freeing the text of its primary function and operating according to a constructive and not at all destructive process, as it might appear to a superficial glance. Soon the artist moved on to the erasing of complete texts and books, including the choice of publication as an integral part of the conceptual aspect of the entire operation, as in the case of the famous series of encyclopedias: working, in fact, on the Treccani, on the Larousse encyclopedia, on the British and Soviet encyclopedia, Isgrò enriches his work with a political value, transforming the erasure into a tool for investigating the relationship between knowledge and authority. Over the years, the act of erasing enters into dialogue not only with contemporary international artistic research attributable to the field of Conceptual Art but, even more deeply, with the languages and history of painting. A similar procedure - of opening up meanings through a gesture of apparent subtraction - is also applied to images, especially taken from the field of mass media. In the work exhibited at the Madre entitled Jacqueline from 1965 (formerly part of the solo exhibition that the artist created in 1974 at the Lia Rumma gallery in Naples), the text completely replaces the image and itself becomes a visual datum, through a game of correspondences between typographic symbols and journalistic language, between visual communication and its suppression. The image of Jacqueline Kennedy bending over her husband who was the victim of the attack (an image that has traveled the world and made history) is restored to a more intimate form of understanding through its own elimination. Both the work on the text and the work on the image must be understood in their mutual interdependence, in the relationship that both establish between verbal and visual communication. In all of Isgrò's work, therefore, we can recognize a criticism conducted against those systems - from the world of information to the material supports of education - within which the transmission of knowledge is closely linked to the creation and maintenance of power.

In 1977 the artist made his debut in Naples with a large pastel mural in the gallery of Lucio Amelio. The work constitutes the first sign of the new pictorial figuration that in those years imposed itself as a new trend in contemporary art in the world, the Transavanguardia, which made its debut at the Venice Biennale in 1980. In Mimmo Paladino's artistic research, images referring to an arcane and primitive universe, where forms are translated into elegant and simplified signs. Allegorical figures inhabit a world where living and dead coexist, skulls and skeletons, the characteristic masks without expression, animals. The same forms are progressively freeing themselves from the initial support to then live independently in a three-dimensional context. Since 1985, the dialogue between painting and sculpture has become tighter and large-scale installations are increasingly based on combinations of figurative sculptural elements with monochromatic pictorial scans. In the room dedicated to him to the Mother, the ensemble formed by the hermetic signs scratched on the rough surface of the walls and the sculpture projecting into space take on an environmental relief that immerses the viewer in an epiphanic totality.

Starting from a real image, the artist breaks down its recognizable line into horizontal, lateral and oblique lines, creating a rarefied and indefinite panorama, which only a "distant" and visionary gaze, as opposed to the hyperrealism of the photographic medium, can recomposing imperfections or vibrating shading effects, real figures and faces, immersed in their context: Portraits, such as those presented on the occasion of personal exhibitions at the Swabian Castle of Bari (2002), the MANN-National Archaeological Museum of Naples (2003 ) and the Institut Français in Florence (2009). "If you get too close, you don't see." The distance of the vision, the suggestion of the gaze, the primitive intuition of the figuration, be it a face or a landscape, constitute the vocabulary of this very personal abstraction: those that at first glance seem to be just a succession of digital strokes. broken down, they are recomposed in a transversal way, making something unexpected appear before our eyes: the horizon of a subliminal and hypothetical figuration. Perception and intuition, transversality and obliquity, television and computer movement as opposed to photographic stasis are the fundamental concepts in Thorel's research. “The oblique gaze is a gaze that escapes and that leads you to put yourself on the side of things in order to lose that lucidity that would not give space to chance. Do not be too lucid, lose concentration, perceive rather than look, leave room for apparitions, are an integral part of my work tools like the camera and the computer ”. As Greta Travagliati writes, Thorel's research constitutes in this sense a moment of synthesis in the “experimentation and reflection on the role of photography in contemporary culture”. The transit from digital decomposition to the real recomposition of the gaze, "the passage" from the absence of vision to intuition are the interpretative elements that in the site-specific installation Passage of Victory, created especially for the Mother, are manifested in their most emblematic meaning. , constituting the most accomplished work created to date by the artist.