Solo che amore ti colpisca

On Thursday 27 June at 6 pm, in three halls of the Real Albergo delle Povere in Palermo, the exhibition “Solo che amore ti colpisca” (If only love should strike you) – a title quoting an intense poem by Salvatore Quasimodo – conceived and curated by Helga Marsala for Riso, the Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palermo, opens. A project revolving around the nature of the photographic image, set in relation to the power of poetic verse: conceived as an open atlas in progress, in which contemporary poetry and photography coexist, “Solo che amore ti colpisca” brings together the work of a number of Sicilian artists and poets – established masters, mid-career and emerging authors: very different figures, dialectically connected through subtle correspondences, by contrast or by assonance. Their gazes echo the substance of that “plural island” so wonderfully described by Gesualdo Bufalino. The exhibition will be open until 13 September.

«Italo Calvino urged us to “fight the abstractness of language” at the dawn of this century. And so, among the other aims and meanings that each visitor may attribute to the exhibition conceived and curated by Helga Marsala for the Museum – says the director of the Museo Riso, Evelina De Castro – this too can be appreciated, in both directions: the visual works and the literary works, each born with its own autonomous language, acquire meaning in the exhibition by being paired, so that they “signify” each other even where, in form and style, they might be described as abstract. From the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs to Jesuit emblems, the theme of “text and image” is a constant in the history of culture. In a time and latitude closer to us, from the magazine Paragone (1950) to the Gruppo 63, founded in Palermo in 1963, from conceptual art to the most recent research, the theme continues to stimulate critics, historians, curators and artists, with incursions and hybridisations. Within this continuum the exhibition proposes a path in which the curator/art critic mixes images and texts, whose new identity lies in being two parts of a single whole».

[source: palermoculture]