La Centrale, Nuvola Lavazza
via Ancona 11/a — Torino
1—3 NOV 2019
The exhibition provides an overview of the endless open field outside traditional art forms in which Nannucci has tested his creativity. He has freed his expression from pre-established grids, opening up to the most varied disciplines: from Concrete and Sound Poetry to music, and even touching on areas of scientific knowledge. On display are various types of editions and multiples made by Nannucci in more than fifty years of work between 1967 and 2019. For the first time, hundreds of pieces can be seen in one place, with this broad selection of artist’s books, magazines, discs, catalogues, posters, postcards, prints, neon lights, multiples and ephemera of all kinds.
Nannucci has moved independently of art movements, beyond the usual limits of artistic language. He has made expressive territories that the art system considers marginal into his central core of research. He has given lightness and new vitality to the status of the work of art. He has stripped away categories, limits, obligations and hand-me-downs, using multiples and editions as agile forms of dissemination and exchange of ideas. He has created a network of international relationships with other artists. He has organised exhibitions, musical events, edited anthologies, published magazines and every other type of publication, working as a deviser of situations, able to conceive and organise alternative spaces and times for his works and those of the artists of his generation.
The works on display are not limited to their communicative effectiveness or to the energy that is released by the creativity of such an extensive artistic community, which are indeed aspects of a surprising force: each work is also an essay on Nannucci’s ability to ‘read language’, to bring out the beauty of its social reverberation, the multiplicity of languages, expressions and their way of intertwining with the infinite visible and sound dimension of the world, as well as seeing and listening to the deepest reverberation of words, their shadow zone, where meaning seems to withdraw to speak through absence.
Of all the artists who between the sixties and seventies began to use language, moving between the vast territory of the printing press and neon lights, Nannucci is the one who made the aura of words resound, who took up the theme of silence at the heart of modern European poetry and the contemporary philosophy of language and made it explode, with a good dose of irony, before the eyes of all, evoking it clearly on posters, in cities, on buildings and architecture, on infinite objects and publications that pass from hand to hand and tell all the complexity of the words we use and the ideas we nurture about the meaning of art and of the world.
