In the context of a year dedicated to a broad and articulated reflection on the concept of island - understood not only in its geographical dimension, but as a semantic device, generator of narratives, cosmologies, idealities, and utopias - the MAN Museum in Nuoro continues its investigative path with the solo exhibition of Alfredo Casali, titled Isolitude, scheduled for the winter season.

After Minor Islands. Notes on the photographic from 1990 to today and Islands and Idols (currently ongoing until November 16), the new exhibition is part of a cycle that explores the concept of insularity through different visions, giving voice to artistic perspectives that question the meaning and boundaries of the island, as an idea that becomes a place, a concept that takes shape in space.

As a representative of a pictorial research deeply devoted to the language of painting itself and its persistence in an exact balance between narration and abstraction, between sign and matter, Alfredo Casali presents at MAN a nucleus of unpublished and recent works that delve into the theme of the porous boundary, of the archaic origin, of voluntary detachment and at the same time of re-emergence from the shallows of oblivion. The neologism "isolitude" shapes in his painting a complex and fascinating existential condition: that of those who identify in the island - in its physical coordinates, but also in its inhabiting the unconscious - an ancestral need for belonging and, at the same time, a melancholic feeling of isolation.

Sailing through the territories of identity, memory, self-perception, and the world, isolitude becomes a mental state, a fulfilling suffering of the void around, the vertigo in the face of the liquid desert. Intense pages of modern insular literature, from Salvatore Satta to Gesualdo Bufalino, have returned the fossils of a life lived on the margins and yet at the center, in a microcosm that is also the infinite, in a solitude that is also beauty. In such acute tension between rooting and detachment, between thirst for elsewhere and pride in that remote land theorized by the anthropologist Matteo Meschiari, a universal dimension is found that unites distant peoples, all children of an island, all inhabitants of isolitude.