We pay tribute to one of the great figures in Italian art after the Second World War: Gastone Novelli (Vienna, 1925 - Milan, 1968). Ca’ Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna dedicates an important monographic exhibition to him, offering the public the opportunity to rediscover both his artistic brilliance and his revolutionary spirit. At the same time, the project celebrates the arrival at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice of two works donated by his heirs to the civic collections, two masterpieces that mark the extremes of Novelli’s mature production and the years on which the exhibition focuses: Era glaciale (‘Ice Age’, 1958) and Allunga il passo amico mio (‘Quicken your pace, my friend’, 1967).
The exhibition unfolds across eight rooms on the second floor of the museum and presents around sixty works covering the most fruitful years of Novelli’s production, from 1957 to 1968. It opens with the informal works of the late 1950s and continues through to those created at the end of the decade, in which Novelli’s words and actions once again acquired a more explicit ethical and political dimension. The 1950s marked the transition from material and gestural Informal art – still evident in his early works, in which Novelli introduced writing as both visual and narrative sign – to the neo-Dada influences apparent in his explorations of the expressive possibilities of matter. This first section also features Era glaciale, an extraordinary evocation of the magical language that would become Novelli’s true stylistic hallmark, poised between fantasy and lyricism. The work forms part of Novelli’s intimate yet universal diary: a story written in new signs and upon new media.
Arranged chronologically, the exhibition traces the artist’s successive creative phases. His relationship with Venice is underscored by the focus on his two participations in the Biennale with solo rooms, in 1964 and in his notorious – and final – appearance in 1968. In his search for a language capable of expressing prehistorical, naturally magical thought (or mythical, as Lévi-Strauss wrote), Novelli centred his work on a world of signs taking the form of archetypes such as the circle, the spiral, and the omphalos. One room is devoted to the travels and impressions arising from his stays in Greece, a magical and mythical land that inspired seminal works on the theme of mountains, echoed also in the sculptures on display. The mystical and mythical symbols that already animated the surface of Era glaciale evolved into a means of organising composition according to a new conception of space and time outside the notions of history and physics.
In the works of 1966–68, the ideological content becomes unmistakable, fully manifest in the monumental final room of the exhibition. Venice also marks a return in Novelli’s artistic and personal story. The artist moved to the city in 1967 and remained until October 1968, working in a studio at the Casa dei Tre Oci on the Giudecca. It was at Vittorio Carrain’s restaurant All’Angelo (formerly the birthplace of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in the immediate post-war years), that Allunga il passo amico mio was created, now part of the Venetian civic collections. Realised in May 1967, the work has an unusual format within Novelli’s oeuvre, resembling almost the expanse of the lagoon horizon, extending over five metres in width. Initially part of Carrain’s collection, then owned by the All’Angelo restaurant and later acquired by the Novelli Archive, it is a vibrant piece that testifies to the artist’s intensely Venetian period, his friendships in the city, and his inexhaustible experimentation.
And thus we arrive at the legendary 1968 Biennale and Novelli’s mark upon the canvas within the halls of the exhibition. The year 1968 was both the year of his death and of his consecration to eternity, through a symbolic and powerful act of protest: he turned the paintings in his personal room at the Venice International Art Exhibition to face the wall and on the back of one inscribed “The Biennale is fascist”. With this gesture, Novelli entered the collective memory of the art world as one of the undisputed protagonists of a remarkable moment of conscience, rebellion, and responsibility.
All images: courtesy MUVE. Exhibition views, ph. Irene Fanizza