Maria Morganti

Development of a Painting    

The permanent installation by the artist Maria Morganti 

carried out in collaboration with Giovanni Bonotto 

for the Café designed by Mario Botta    

curated by Chiara Bertola    

The project originated from a work that Maria Morganti painted in 2008 for the nineteenth-century room in the museum on the second floor of the Fondazione.

In that room the artist focussed on Alessandro Milesi’s painting La Modella (1910) and in particular on the flower in the young woman’s hair, imagining it as the palette on which the artist reflected on his colours.

Maria Morganti’s painting is the result of the experience of the artist with those colours, which she has translated into her own coulors layering them, one over the other, but leaving them visible at the top of the painting.  When in 2015 Maria Morganti accepted Chiara Bertola’s invitation to work in the café spaces, she decided to return to her green painting and to her diary of brushstrokes.

 “I started from that painted flower and chromatic ‘clump’, thinking of it symbolically as the condensed point of the artist’s thought and I tried to understand how to expand it in the space. Was it possible to think of a wider gesture? How could I go from intimacy to exteriority? I imagined that the painting was expanding and that the colour was distributed in the space. I thought of a dilatation of the painting in the architecture as though each single layer were peeling away three-dimensionally in the space. I felt Mario Botta’s space as the place that could welcome and contain my colour.” 

Maria Morganti was also inspired by the relationship and accord with another experience of research and work that led to new situations occurring. It was the meeting with the textile manufacturer Bonotto, which the artist was able to work with empathetically. The challenge was to add a new ‘layer’ to the Querini collection and a new ‘layer’ to the Bonotto textile collection.

The artist has translated the gesture of painting with the practice of weaving, and has turned every single layer of colour into a coloured canvas. From the canvas as the support of the painting to the canvas as the subject-colour itself. “Just as every single brushstroke of colour consists of many gradations, so the fabric I developed with Giovanni Bonotto is made up of numerous threads which together create a single colour”. From afar they look like large monochrome canvases, and it is only when you get close up that you realise that the colour consists of numerous nuances.  However, the installation for the café is completed in its entirety only when we go up to the second floor of the museum and return to her painting in the nineteenth-century room next to Milesi’s Modella which inspired it.

“The circle closes and the project is activated when we recompose the backward process in time through our perception. The imagination returns to where things were created.”

Immagini