“Global thinking and local action” has been the mission of the MAN for twenty-six years.
Looking at the world and acting locally. This, in short, is the approach of a museum deeply rooted in its local context, yet capable of broadening its perspective to a wider horizon.
The virtuous combination of enhancing the permanent collection of Sardinian art and creating projects with an international profile continues in the programming, which, over the last three years, has seen the weavers of Sarule paying tribute to Picasso, the technology of Pininfarina hosting a leap into the Nuragic past, Matisse’s sculptures interacting with the mother goddesses from the archaeological museums of Sardinia, the portrait collection dotted with contemporary additions, distinguished by the experimental language of young emerging artists awarded by the Ministry’s funding.
While awaiting the exhibition next summer, which will see modern giants such as Gauguin, Arp, and Miró confront the idols of the Mediterranean, including the menhirs of the Laconi museum, the recently inaugurated major retrospective of Giovanni Pintori also contains this dual vision. A genius of international graphic design, inventor of the legendary Olivetti image, Pintori held in his hands and eyes the glimpses of his land, Nuoro, and the clusters of white, silent houses overlooking the oak cliff that looks towards Oliena.
In those same synthetic, cold geometries, modular architectures transformed into the keys of a computer and multiplied in space like the numbers of a combinatorial calculation, there is his past story, but also a universal story of formal research, mindful of the lessons of Cézanne and Morandi. The elastic, spring-like, visionary talent is that of someone who knows how to orchestrate their own experience with the absolute, the moment with the eternal. Pintori did this in the cultured references, vibrating in the background, to ancient, archaeological art, and then to the art of the avant-garde, studied and absorbed into his compositions with perfect balance.
At the same time, we at MAN, who love to create plays of cross-references between intertwined paths (such as the solo exhibitions of Cagliari’s Alessandro Biggio and the “Germans” Szeemann and Löhr), have also woven a semantic fabric that, starting from Pintori, opens up to Morandi (a friend of whom Pintori owned a still life, displayed on a dresser next to a sculpture by Fancello) and further extends to the work of a contemporary, Gregorio Botta.
His exact calculations, the rotating compasses in the air, geometric solids, lines, axes, symmetries, are in turn a tribute to the master of bottles and, at the same time, an ideal reference to Pintori’s celibate machines and his obsession with perpetual motion. Everything is connected. Everything comes back. And everything is interconnected. Just like local action and global thinking.
Chiara Gatti