Nuvolo Spazioⁿ
Nuvolo Spazioⁿ
solo exhibition curated by Bruno Corà, Aldo Iori and Paolo Ascani
Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto
December 14, 2024 – February 23, 2025
Opening Saturday December 14, at 11.30 am
The exhibition NUVOLO Spazion was born from the collaboration between the Gallery of Modern Art “G. Carandente” of Spoleto and the Nuvolo Archive Association of Città di Castello and aims to show a particular aptitude of the artist Nuvolo (Giorgio Ascani, 1926-2008) to experience in painting the countless variations of possible spatiality within painting: in the title of the exhibition the elevation ‘to the nth’ of the term ‘space’ is to indicate the vast amount of variations of space used by the artist in his works during his long career. This has led to an artistic production, continuous and always conceptually recognizable, with mutations and cycles of works often even formally different from the previous ones.
The titling NUVOLO Spazion is also meant to recall Nuvolo’s wide-ranging and timely interest in the scientific aspects of human knowledge and its iterations with art making: thus continuous attentions to new technologies simultaneously with the most advanced theories of physics and mathematics.
The twelve exhibition rooms of Palazzo Collicola will be set up in such a way as to emphasize, in the display of the different pictorial cycles, the changing visions of the theme of space present in them, providing the visitor with an overall view of the artist’s kaleidoscopic workings in the vast territory of painting, giving him or her the visual and critical tools to weave the thought that binds the works one to the other and define Nuvolo’s complex artistic personality.
Exhibitions in recent years have highlighted various other aspects of Nuvolo’s work. Nuvolo and Post-War Materiality 1950-1960 (Di Donna Galeries, New York, 2017-2018, curated by Germano Celant) and Nuvolo and the Crucial Years (Galleria Scaramouche loves Aline, Milan, 2019, curated by Daniele Ugolini) have highlighted the relationship with his painter and sculptor friends of the 1950s and 1960s, years in which Nuvolo produced most of the pictorial cycles; Melani | Nuvolo, tra arte e scienza, at the Abbey of Montecassino and CaMusAC Museo Arte Contemporanea, Cassino, 2021-2022, curated by Bruno Corà) in comparing two emblematic artistic figures of the twentieth century, he emphasized the relationship between art and science; Nuvolo Nuntius Revelatus. La pittura di serigrafia tra caos e ordine (Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia, 2023-2024, with a conference that also paid tribute to the institution’s director figure, curated by Bruno Corà, Aldo Iori and Paolo Ascani) examined the use of the modern serigraphic technique as a means of pictorial production of individual works, from the first Serotipie of 1951 to the latest ones dated in the new millennium.
Attention to the use of the internal spatiality of the work, from the rarefaction of color to the complete sign filling, from static to dynamic handling, to the evocation of concepts proper to modern physics, is an aspect that has been little investigated until now and becomes a characterizing element of the Spoleto exhibition.
The works are from private and public collections, Italian and foreign, and from the Nuvolo archive in Città di Castello, which also provides part of the exhibition’s logistical support. The exhibition will be accompanied by critical cards illustrating the various cycles and a catalog with essays by Saverio Verini and curators Bruno Corà, Aldo Iori, and Paolo Ascani.
