At the Bourse de Commerce, arte povera in a rich panorama

What united them was “a free expression, linked to contingency, to the event, to the present. » Thus the art critic Germano Celant defined the matrix of arte povera. The only link, perhaps, to this free and libertarian group who ignited the Italian art scene from the 1960s. Bringing art and life together, such was the obsession of these twenty or so artists with works so diverse and so singular. They have never united under a manifesto, much less behind a dogma.

“The term ‘arte povera’ has been invented by Germano Celantwho died in 2020 during the Covid pandemic and to whom, in a way, this exhibition pays homage. But rather than a school, it was a vague association of friends who shared beliefs and practices”, recalls Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, eminent specialist of the movement and curator of the immense exhibition which awakens its memory, this fall, at the Bourse de Commerce.

She narrowed her selection to 13 of these mastersand we must cite them all, as each one is infinitely singular: here they are united again, as in Turin and Rome here you are great, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz et, seule femme du movement, l ‘épouse de cernier, Marisa Merz.

Salads, neon lights…

This friendship, this desire to overturn everything also, this is undoubtedly the only persistent link between the self-portrait in a watered sprinkler of Boetti, the still lifes frozen in ice of Calzolari, the fire writings of Kounellis. Earth, lettuce, potatoes, water and coal, trees and living bodies, they seize everything that nature offers as well as the artifices of the cityneon, steel, lead, light bulbs, to reinvent the world. “In the context of the industrialization of Italy and the domination of the American artistic scene, the challenge is then to invent a new relationship with the worldgoing against the dehumanizing forces of consumerism, while regaining ‘possession of reality’ according to Celant’s expression”, recalls Emma Lavigne, director of the Pinault Collection, who initiated the exhibition.