Ettore Spalletti

Over the course of 40 years, Ettore Spalletti has traversed some of the most significant episodes in the history of international art, developing an original idiom capable of establishing a dialogue between contemporaneity and classicism.The three exhibitions, conceived by the artist in close dialogue with the museum spaces, recount every aspect of his work, from painting to sculpture and through to environmental installations, set within non-chronological configurations that are instead open to the suggestions of the works themselves.

At the artist's behest a black and white photographic reproduction of a historic work welcomes visitors at the entrance to the MAXXI exhibition. In one of his first exhibitions in Pescara entitled E porgere, chissa? da quale tempo, quanto rimane vivo (And to Hand Over Who Knows from When, Whatever Remains Alive 1976), the artist had replaced two stones of the old paving of the Bagno Borbonico with two plaster casts in pink and blue. For the duration of the exhibition the artist returned to dust the surface, depositing the pigment all around. The photo shows the hands of the artist seemingly caressing a dusty surface.

The same image is repeated in the three museums as a fil rouge linking the three exhibitions. For the exhibition at the MAXXI Ettore Spalletti has appropriated a space within the Museum to construct another itinerary from his most recent works. The arrangement is musical, comprised of chromatic chords, pauses and silences that link the pieces into a single composition: each work emits its own individual sound that, when experienced from the centre of the gallery join to create a harmonious symphony.

On the walls of the room, the colour moves across large format panels like the Parole di Colore (Words of colour) all completed in 2011, works in which the paint seems to move, instable, rarefied. Spalletti touches all the architectural elements, from the floor, on which the colour rests like a horizon with Voce Bassa (Low voice 2014), an inclined expanse of azure, to the Colonne Sole (Single columns 2014), great apparitions, a tribute to the architecture and the beauty of the Italian landscape, through to the centrality of an absolute sculpture which the visitor is invited to enter. At the centre of the gallery stands in fact the work that lends its title to the triple exhibition project: Un giorno cosi? bianco, cosi? bianco (A day so white, so white 2014). A volume four metres per side that contains 11 white pictures demonstrating that the artist's painting continually verges on sculpture and vice versa.