Opening, December 5, 6:30 PM
Curated by Massimo Ferrari and Chiara Gatti
In the context of a year devoted to an extensive and multifaceted reflection on the concept of the island – understood not only in its geographical dimension, but also as a semantic device, a generator of narratives, cosmologies, ideals, and utopias – the MAN Museum in Nuoro continues its path of investigation with a solo exhibition by Alfredo Casali, entitled Isolitudine, scheduled for the winter season.
After MinorIsland Fotographic notes from 1990 to today Islands and Idols, the new exhibition (on view until November 16), is part of a series that explores the concept of insularity through different perspectives, giving voice to artistic visions that question the meaning and boundaries of the island — as an idea that becomes a place, a concept that takes shape in space.
An exponent of a pictorial research deeply devoted to the very language of painting and to its persistence in a delicate balance between narration and abstraction, between sign and matter, Alfredo Casali presents at the MAN Museum a body of new and recent works that delve into the theme of porous boundaries, archaic origins, voluntary detachment, and, at the same time, the re-emergence from the shallows of forgetfulness. The neologism “isolitudine” shapes in his painting a complex and fascinating existential condition: that of those who identify with the island — in its physical coordinates, but also in its dwelling within the unconscious. an ancestral longing for belonging, intertwined with a melancholic sense of isolation.
Sailing through the territories of identity, memory, and the perception of the self and the world, isolitudine becomes a state of mind — a fulfilling sorrow for the surrounding emptiness, a vertigo before the liquid desert. Intense pages of modern insular literature, from Salvatore Satta to Gesualdo Bufalino, have unearthed the fossils of a life lived on the margins and yet at the centre — within a microcosm that is also infinite, in a solitude that is also beauty. In this acute tension between rootedness and detachment, between the thirst for elsewhere and the pride in that remote territoriality theorized by anthropologist Matteo Meschiari, one rediscovers a universal dimension that unites distant peoples — all children of an island, all inhabitants of isolitudine.
Alfredo Casali gives visual form to it through painting. Since his earliest works, influenced by the lyrical abstraction of Gastone Novelli and Cy Twombly, by visual poetry, and by a suspended figuration imbued with a sense of waiting and heir to Morandi’s silent lesson, the artist has traced within space the most minimal boundaries — vital places confined to the dimension of an intimate everyday, sublimated into domestic archetypes: the house, the tree, the chair, the patch of landscape opening onto the void of the sea or the sky. Formal rigor, geometric synthesis, and an attention to the sign as both an expressive and literary element — rooted in his solid philosophical training — nourish a coherent and deeply meditated pictorial practice and imagery, slow in gesture, in pauses, in the articulation of planes that construct further voids. His rarefied and essential poetics now reaches the threshold of the island — a drawing with frayed edges on the maps of consciousness, an epiphany of rock and sand upon the Cartesian plane of human and cosmic geography.
Alfredo Casali was born in Piacenza in 1955, where he currently lives and works. He graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in 1983, under the supervision of Luciano Anceschi. After an articulated journey through painting, visual poetry, and theoretical studies, he arrived at a personal artistic language characterized by an essential poetic inquiry and by the recurrence of archetypal elements organized in thematic cycles. Among the first to recognize the value of his work was Giovanni Fumagalli, who welcomed him into the historic Galleria delle Ore in Milan and guided him as a mentor between 1986 and 1996. Casali took part in the 32nd Milan City Art Biennale (1993) and in the Cremona Biennale (1993 and 1999), and over the years has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. Among his most significant exhibitions are the solo show at the San Fedele Cultural Center in Milan (2011); his participation in the exhibition dedicated to Imre Reiner and international abstraction at the Museum of Art of Mendrisio (Switzerland); and the group exhibitions Sogno e Confine (Biffi Gallery, Piacenza, 2012) and La natura obliqua (Il Chiostro Contemporary Art, Saronno). In 2014, he presented a solo exhibition at Galleria Ceribelli in Bergamo. Among his recent exhibitions, in 2019 he showed at the Studio d’Arte del Lauro in Milan, and in 2023 at MAN – Museum of Art of the Province of Nuoro, in a project developed in collaboration with the University Campus of Agrigento. The recent exhibition held in 2023 at the Magazzino del Sale in Cervia, entitled Alfredo Casali, Giovanni Fabbri. Geografie vita, territorio, storia, anticipated by a few months the major retrospective of 2024 Alfredo Casali. La memoria delle cose, curated by Massimo Ferrari for Volumnia in the Renaissance nave of the former Church of Sant’Agostino in Piacenza.
They have written about him: Michele Tavola, Franco Fanelli, Sara Fontana, Stefano Fugazza, Ivo Iori, Stefano Crespi, Flavio Arensi, Chiara Gatti, Marina De Stasio, Rocco Ronchi, Giorgio Seveso.
Catalogue ITA/EN Nomos Edizioni
Text byi Massimo Ferrari and Chiara Gatti
Coordination Rita Moro
Graphic by Sabina Era