Michelangelo Antonioni. Le montagne incantate. [Edizione italiana e inglese]

The idea of organising an exhibition of Michelangelo Antonioni's paintings, The Enchanted Mountains, at the Museo Nazionale d'Abruzzo in L'Aquila is not new, even if the project has finally materialised only this year in collaboration with the Civic Museums of Contemporary Art in Ferrara. Although it appears to be an emotional, posthumous homage to this great director, it is nevertheless a tribute that is owed to such a charismatic and versatile artist. The idea had been indirectly approved in 2003 by Michelangelo and his wife Enrica Antonioni, who had become "the director's voice." At the time they were in the Abruzzi region to attend the Teofilo Patini Award in Castel di Sangro to which the artist had kindly loaned some blow ups of his personal collection.
An exhibition can be a place where an artist's poetics and the site's identity ideally merge, a place where the works establish a relationship with the architectural context. In this case, visitors can develop a series of aesthetic and moral ideas and associations and may view the museum as an historical site 'inhabited' by emotions.
The harsh, isolated and stark architecture of the Fort, with its grandiose natural surroundings, is anything but neutral vis-à-vis Antonioni's visionary landscapes. It permits comparisons, cross-references and visual effects between the capricious natural environment of the Apennines and the pretence, or perhaps we should say, the independent reality of those images of mountains, geographically undefined and unrecognisable.
Presented in 1983 at the Museo Correr in Venice and later at the National Gallery of Modern Art, these evanescent images that conjure up the turbulence and metamorphosis of matter adapt to the diffuse light and reassuring halls of the museum.
Together with Andrea Buzzoni, Director of the Cultural Activities Department of the Ferrara Municipality, we have chosen 160 works, a broad-ranging and almost complete selection from the Enchanted Mountains in the Museo Antonioni. The works are on loan thanks to the trust and collaboration that exists between our two institutions, and for this we would like to thank the Director and all the collaborators of the Civic Museums. The exhibition illustrates the artist's entire creative process: from the original, miniature tempera drawings (which he considered as the starting point for his work) to the photographic enlargements, the blow ups, in other words, the mechanical transformation of the scraps of paper. The exhibition in Ferrara in 1993 focused on the multiple pictorial styles experimented by the artist; instead in this year's exhibition in Rome, Antonioni had presented his last works painted with the "colours of silence." The time has come to compare the abstract photography of the Enchanted Mountains with the sets and "psychological power of colour" of some of his famous films: the petrified black and white mineral world of The Adventure (1959), the violent coloured smoke and purple fogs of Red Desert (1964), the lunar landscape of Zabriskie Point (1970), the ochre and rosy landscape of The Passenger (1974).
In the main sequence of Blow Up (1966), thanks to a photographic enlargement, the protagonist sees a reality not discernible by the naked eye: this becomes the metaphor of the creative process Antonioni uses in his paintings. This complex relationship between art and the cinema is documented by a series of images chosen by the Audiovisual Department of the Supervisory Services.
This catalogue contains several essays published many years ago, including those by Giulio Carlo Argan and Maurizio Calvesi, as well as an invaluable and unpublished essay on Antonioni the "painter" by Lorenza Trucchi.
The dedicated and extremely competent Supervisory Services involved in the project have worked enthusiastically with the L'Aquila Film Institute and the Image Academy: to them we owe the excellent choice of lighting and exhibition design in the riding school and halls of the Fort.
The event, financed by private sponsors, has been included by the Province of L'Aquila in the calendar of events being held in the framework of the Week of the Mountain.
We would like to sincerely thank all those who have made it possible, once again, to view these wonderful images, and not just the ones on film, by one of the greatest maestro of the cinema.