The Museo Civico di Castelbuono is pleased to present the exhibition naturalia/artificialia, a solo show by Sandro Scalia, the first in a series of in-depth presentations of the artists represented in the Museum’s permanent collection. On the occasion of the opening, the restoration of a photograph taken by the artist in 1995, from the Museum’s storerooms, will be presented to the public. The image shows a detail of Giacomo Serpotta’s late seventeenth-century stuccoes.
The exhibition naturalia/artificialia is a new project by Sandro Scalia, produced following a residency exploring the artistic, architectural and landscape heritage of Castelbuono and its surroundings. A visual investigation, using the languages of video and photography, carried out in a number of specific places, following botanical cues and phenomena of light and sound: the wood of monumental holly trees, the Clock Tower and details of some evocative sites, in continuity with the investigation of the Sicilian landscape that the artist has been pursuing for over a decade with the project Letture siciliane. Scalia has an expert knowledge of the Madonie Park area, which has been the subject of many of his works, from A20, devoted to the construction of the Palermo–Messina motorway with its monumental viaducts, to the series of shots of “Sunday day-trippers” in the snow at Piano Battaglia, to name but a few.
The photographic prints and videos on display – the soundtrack of one of them was created in collaboration with the composer and performer Alessandro Librio – offer a new reading of the contemporary landscape, in continuity with the research into the identity of the territory carried out by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono. The idea is to deepen our knowledge, from different perspectives, of the environment around us, a setting of great beauty on which our gaze lingers ever more distractedly. Sandro Scalia’s lens and the panoramic format of the images, stretched horizontally – the artist’s favourite cut – draw us into the image and seduce us through the language of colour, the elegant choice of light contrasts and a staging that is either carefully constructed or found by chance. What emerges is the photographer’s gaze, which involves us all as spectators, with the aim of developing a broader discourse on our personal relationship with the horizon, with the space we inhabit and, above all, with the image, captured in a gesture that suspends a moment for ever. At the end of the exhibition Sandro Scalia will donate a photographic work, the outcome of the project carried out for the exhibition, in order to enrich the permanent collection of the Museo Civico di Castelbuono with a newly commissioned artistic production.
Sandro Scalia’s project is accompanied by the publication of a notebook, with an introduction by Laura Barreca, an interview by Valentina Bruschi and a critical essay by Salvatore Davì. The notebook format, later adopted for the Museo Civico’s “quaderni della collezione” (collection notebooks) series, was conceived and designed by Paolo Di Vita, lecturer in Editorial Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan.
We would like to thank the Agriturismo Bergi for supporting Sandro Scalia’s project, and The HotelSphere Hotel & Villa Collection of Palermo, main sponsor of the Museo Civico di Castelbuono’s annual programme.
