The exhibition "ISLANDS AND IDOLS", which inaugurates the summer season of the MAN Museum in Nuoro, is born to answer these questions and to understand how the symbolic and mythical power of ancient figures, kept within the confines of insularity, has regenerated, centuries later, in the forms of the modern.

Balancing between the Neolithic and the dawn of the twentieth century, between archaeology and avant-garde, between Cycladic idols and the wooden sculptures that Gauguin carved in his years in Tahiti, the path fluctuates between past and present in search of returns, shared feelings, genetic inheritances, effusive impulses destined to resurface at alternating phases, as in geological cycles, and to guide the hands of authors eager to shape similar forms. Not, therefore, the idea of the traveler who, exploring, finds, absorbs, and replicates. But the more vital concept that the ancient and the modern touch each other outside of time and space, strongly nourished by the same need: to represent the elsewhere through statues, steles, monoliths that embody the invisible on earth.

"It is not necessary - writes Chiara Gatti in her text - for postcolonial revisionism to affirm that, in their hieratic stature, there is nothing primitive, exotic, disturbing. It is pure abstraction. They are mother goddesses, merciful and grandiose at the same time, like Egyptian prophetesses, like Etruscan offerers, like handmaidens stolen from Greek vase painting. And their gazes that peer into the void, immersed in a Casoratian expectation, recall the disarmed immobility of Dürer's Melancholia, an allegory of the human intellect meditating on the fate of the cosmos."

Critically positioning itself as a reflection on contemporary concepts of otherness, primitivism, and their repercussions in the heart of the postcolonial debate - extended well beyond the history of art - the exhibition delves into anthropological reasons inherent in the presence of totemic figures within the circumscribed perimeters of an island and explains how masters of the caliber of Gauguin, Pechstein, Miró, Arp, or Matisse, during their travels, have re-elaborated this coexistence, projecting their own statuary icons into the absolute dimension of the sacred.