In his eyes, arte povera has “300 million years”and not sixties… Do most art historians identify this artistic avant-garde in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s? Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev sees further, further: she demonstrates it in the vast retrospective of the movement she orchestrates at the Paris Stock Exchange. Pistoletto, Penone, Zorio, Anselmo, Pascali… is the life and work of the thirteen main artists of the movement that runs through here. And a little bit of yours. Because he learned everything from them. “Art Povera is my entire professional life”recalls the eminent specialist.
For more than twenty years he directed the Castello di Rivoli, whose collection houses numerous masterpieces from post-war Italy. He had barely left the institution near Turin when he embarked on the adventure offered by the Pinault collection. “I was going to retire.”, she assures, when Emma Lavigne, director of the Pinault Collection, proposed this challenge to me. The quality of the arte povera works in this collection is so exceptional that I immediately accepted! »
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev became interested in this movement from the beginning of her career, in the 1980s: “The fashion then was trans-avant-garde, very traditional and old-fashioned painting, no arte povera., she remembers. What I immediately liked about these artists was their ability to engage in non-binary, but complex, thinking like that of the Baroque. » It is in this sense that, as she states, arte povera has always existed. “Beyond the free association of friends that we celebrate here, it is a point of view on the aesthetic and ethical issues of art, on the experience of the work. This is the supreme poor french canathe “supreme poverty of San Francisco”, a work done. Masaccio painted arte povera, Caravaggio too. »
“Perpetual change”
From the Documenta he staged in Kassel (Germany) in 2012 to the Istanbul Biennial in 2015, he has continued to apply the lessons learned from these thirteen artists, all of whom he has worked with, except Pino Pascali, who died tragically in 1968. “Alighiero Boetti often told me: “There is no point in starting from scratch, inventing anything. Everything is already there. We just have to bring the world to the world.” »
When he evokes the spirit of arte povera, he simultaneously invokes a thousand other spirits, the heroes of mythology, the craftsmen of the Neolithic, the pre-Socratics. In his dizzying conversation, he goes from the quattrocento of Piero della Francesca to the best ice cream parlor from Italy, after having approached Malevich’s abstraction. Of arte povera she always promises to give a definition; she goes around, rambles, elaborates. But describing this art with words does not interest him. What you want the visitor to feel is the experience. “The cliché is to define this movement by the use of humble materials, wood, stone, charcoal, etc. But we can deepen it and make it more complex. »
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