Morandi e Fontana. Invisibile e Infinito

Bottles, pitchers, small jars, coffee makers, tin boxes, sunlit hills, farmhouses, country roads, buildings and courtyards — these are the subjects of Giorgio Morandi's works on display. Still lifes made of color and light. Landscapes contemplated from afar, walls warmed by the summer sun, buildings that almost dissolve like ash in the wind.

Everyday objects and domestic spaces, humble and familiar places that re-emerge as eternal, immortal, resistant to the passing of time, to inevitable decay, and to disappearance. Their eternal presence stems from the fact that they hold both the visible and the invisible. The visible recedes into the realm of the invisible, and vice versa — the invisible illuminates the visible in objects and landscapes.

Time seems to slow down and then stand still. Sensations unfold slowly, with mysterious intimacy and intensity. The reality of things in Morandi's painting has changed in texture, weight, and luminosity thanks to the painter’s technical mastery and metaphysical sensitivity. Objects and landscapes emerge with a different substance, one that does not belong to the real world, nor even to the symbolic.

Lucio Fontana’s works, with their slashes, open a window onto the immeasurable — a void behind the canvas that gestures toward the unrepresentable nature of infinite space and time. These works reject optical illusion and realistic depiction to embrace the imagination of infinity. Fontana creates a dual vertigo: both conceptual and visual-perceptual. Infinity narrows within the edges of the cut, and our finitude plunges beyond the limits of representation.

Before the white surface — as untouched as a blank page — we are denied any figurative illusion or reference to either art history or real life. The mind is left free to dive into contemplation of the infinite. Fontana’s gesture was bold and definitive: cutting a breach in the canvas so that the mind could take a virtual step beyond space, overcoming physical and cultural limits to imagine — and even feel — the limitless.

For Morandi, the goal was to refine pictorial language to the point of making the invisible phenomenologically perceptible. Fontana, on the other hand, reduced every figurative potential to a gesture — a cut — which aimed to be absolute, but not final. It was the only possible gesture to open a passage toward the infinite, an irreversible step toward artistic freedom.

A dialogue between two of the brightest lights in twentieth-century Italian art — so different in their approaches to life and creative practice, and yet equally exemplary in their constant search to transcend the limits of perception.
Morandi overcame the dullest surface of figurative language to grasp the invisible; Fontana freed himself from the deception of the canvas, forcing infinity into the physical space of a cut or a hole.

Two artists who have long inhabited our collective gaze, as Cicero once said of famous individuals, and who have undoubtedly changed the way we look at the world and think about art. In recent decades, both have become international points of reference for contemporary artists, offering ideas and inspiration in their uniquely powerful ways.