The Eugenio Tibaldi exhibition in Naples
With his new project at the Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Eugenio Tibaldi takes us into the sleepiness of the Italian province
Nostalgically titled Balera (popular dance floor that suggests provincial and secondary and peripheral and marginal and suspended places, now shadowy of memory), this new and compelling exhibition of Eugenio Tibaldi (Alba, 1977) organized at the Galleria Umberto Di Marino is yet another proof of an intense journey, careful to calibrate the image of thought, to build structures with coexisting multiplicities.
Tibaldi is now a giant of Italian art: what makes us understand loud and clear is not only a chameleon-like methodology capable of changing according to the places or layers of culture involved in his dense linguistic machinery, but also the effervescence of an approach that is transforms into a visual journey increasingly attentive to the active involvement of the viewer, to the layering of stories that absorb and bring into play the eye (the thought) of the public.
THE BALERA PROJECT BY EUGENIO TIBALDI
In 2021 Eugenio Tibaldi created some truly grandiose projects and we can fully recognize him – as already done on these pages – the gold medal of the best Italian artist: Insulation architecture (at the Tenuta dello Scompiglio), Temporary landscape. Herbariums, map, diaries (at the PAV in Turin) are his two special drawings to which must also be added Anthropogenic connection (at the Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa) e Nocturne with figure (at the National Gallery of Rome) of 2020.
Born for the Michetti Museum (in 2019) from an interstitial vision, from a reorganization that is first of all a formation, from a zig-zag that creeps “between” and that captures perceptible relationships quickly with a stammering process, from a marginal condition, far from everything and placed as in limbo, Balera is a tale that feeds on tales, united by a sharp look and tangled together to give life to compositions where culture merges and becomes landscape to redefine the places where we were born.
Each one on display (there are three installations and three related projects) is in fact represented by many stories, by a multiple narrative: the fan with aluminum strips, for example (More there than Abruzzo_42019), represents the world of a person who tells about his life in Abruzzo, his paradise (the breeze that accompanies his distracted days) and his prison: his survival intersects that of a woman who tells about her marriage and that of a single sixty-year-old who lives sitting at the kitchen table waiting, in a livid frustration that makes one think of Giovanni Verga, in limbo, in a solitude broken only by an opening to the outside that can be established virtually, through social media.
THE PROVINCE ACCORDING TO TIBALDI
Provincial kits, feelings of abandonment or fragments of lives lived with the awareness of having betrayed certain expectations, are marinated by the artist to draw a dramatic vision where even nature grows – stepmother, cruel, careless – to entangle, obstruct, trapping the individual in a distant, marginal, even absent social discourse.
Tibaldi with Balera shapes a new and incomparable wonder (the first version of the project was presented on the occasion of the personal More there than Abruzzo curated by Simone Ciglia), which stings the gaze in amazement, dries the throat, leads us into the rawness of despair.
– Antonello Tolve