On ApriI 19th, 1997 the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino presents the thematic exhibition

FIN DE SIÈCLE

Manon: seduzione e dolore (seduction and pain).
Franco Vaccari: esposizione in tempo reale n. 23: Anche tu qui?! Caffè. (exhibition in real time no. 23: You here too?! Café.).

The exhibition, already staged in 1996 with great success at the Loggia degli Abati di Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, promoted by Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, the Region of Liguria and the Leonardi V-Idea, is being put on again in Bellinzona in a version which has been totally renewed and reconceived to suit the spaces it will be occupying.

The exhibition is one of action and fascination, innovation and recognition. Its aim is to bring into relation with each other the work of a man and a woman – in other words two anthropologically different subjects. Franco Vaccari e Manon are two outstanding artists who have made their mark in the contemporary art scene by evolving the idea of exhibition spaces and inventing new expressive means.

The themes of Manon’s work are beauty, individual and social identity, communication, time – all mediated though the body, its disquieting make-up, objects, the scenography of her ambiences. The themes of Franco Vaccari’s work are the limits of representation across the history of artistic models, feedback effects in his exhibitions in real time, the boundaries between reality and fiction, the overturning of exhibition rituals and the unstable identity of the photographic image. While Manon in her two-room sequence opens up space to metaphor, to its aesthetic signs and deeper meanings, Vaccari closes himself off to signs and the meanings of the metaphor, making room instead for traces of life, for his personal path of memory through the twentieth century, as well as for live reportage in the form a café whose total reality can generate unpredictable events even for the artist himself.

The linguistic and existential relationship between these two leading artists, particularly in the period from the sixties to eighties, has always been intense and surprising, both in its points of contact (thresholds, places of transit, voyeuristic activity, the furnishing of ambiences, the use of photographs) and in their different use of language. The aesthetic fascination of Manon’s rooms and the realistic conceptual fascination of Franco Vaccari’s rooms are a measure of the historic stature of these two artists at the conclusion of a century to which they themselves have made unforgettable contributions.

On this occasion a catalogue has been published with texts by Viana Conti and Magda Sohns-Petraglio.

Viana Conti
(translation; lan Harvey)

Ph Franco Vaccari, MACT/CACT.