From the heart of the Peloponnese to the shores of Lake Lugano, in Italian Switzerland, there would only be one leap: that of the imagination of Arcadia, that Greek region that, carried by the words of Virgil in his Bucolic, It came to embody a pastoral paradise even in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. The idea of a new Arcadia modeled at the beginning of the 20th centurymy century in the Ticino region according to this ancient ideal is the starting point of the “Arcadia” exhibition, imagined at the Bally Foundation, located in an ancient residential villa with a Greek name (Villa Heleneum) with panoramic views of the lake.
The tour opens with a frieze of postcards taken from the Lugano archives showing simple 20th-century mountain landscapes, decorated with a few cypresses, before a radical change, from the 1930s to the 1950s, with the appearance of palm trees, some of which are pre-existing photomontages: a strategy to promote a new Mediterranean approach to the lake environment.
With the democratisation of the automobile and the opening up of the region, situated between German-speaking Switzerland and Italy, Ticino became a popular destination. “At that time, Ticino stopped being the North of the South and became the South of the North, to attract visitors. Palm trees became the emblem of this new imagery, to which a touch of classicism was added: false ruins began to invade the landscape.sums up Vittoria Matarrese, director of the establishment and curator of the exhibition.
Fictional landscapes and references
From exotic vegetation to fake remains, everywhere, the gardens surrounding the lake are transformed into timeless oases. The Scherrer Park, created between 1930 and 1956 in Morcote by an art collector (and open to the public since 1965), takes picturesque play to the highest level, with reproductions of ancient statues, an artificial cave and even a fake Greek temple supported by caryatids.
“Arcadia” opens this vision of the spirit of places with Arcadian echoes by focusing on the way contemporary artists (around twenty here) play with the boundaries between nature and artifice, reality and fantasies, to construct fictional landscapes and repositories. If Julius von Bismarck offers a romantic vision, transforming large palm trees – from leaves to roots – into sculptural herbariums, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou creates enlargements of sick palm trees, seen under a microscope, that have not survived the changes in biotopes.
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