Ludovico Pratesi

At the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro, Saturday, July 16th at 6.30 pm, the JANNIS KOUNELLIS exhibition curated by Ludovico Pratesi will be inaugurated and organized by the Municipality of Pesaro, the Beauty and the Museum System, concurrent with the twentieth anniversary of the Visual Arts Center, open in 1996.


In his long and eclectic career, started in the late fifties, when Kounellis leaves Greece to move to Rome, where he currently lives and works, the artist has been part of the Arte Povera movement, theorized by Germano Celant in 1967, to then develop a research based on the use of materials that refer to industrial archeology on the one hand and to the classical world on the other. Charcoal, steel, iron beams, jute bags and stones make sculptures and installations characterized by a solemn, almost epic appearance, to arouse reflections on the life and destiny of humanity.

The spaces of the Pescheria Visual Arts Center welcome the works of Kounellis after important restoration works, which have given back to the former Suffragio church its original dodecagonal plan (it is the only dodecagonal religious building existing in Italy) modified some decades ago by some masonry interventions, today eliminated.

"Art is a presentation and not a representation," says Kounellis. "For me, the exhibition is a unique act: the occupation of a space for the time of a single act, as they say at the theater. I think that for exhibitions, it works like this. And the artist's ability is to have, or get back, the protagonist of all time. My problem is to reconsider the rebirth of drama as positive. Here, this is my intellectual and ideological problem ".

Kounellis has designed a new installation for the Pescheria, which refers to the industrial reality of the city of Pesaro, where the artist has visited some companies. An intervention with a strong symbolic value, which interprets one of the vocations of the city of Marche with a strong and evocative language, characteristic of the artist's imagery, which has twice exhibited recently in the Pesaro area: in 2007 presents Li Marinari to the gallery of Franca Mancini and in 2011 at the convent of the Servi di Maria in Monteciccardo.

Kounmellis has interpreted the Pescheria as a dynamic place, where to bring a fragment of the city to make it relive the memory inside the space "explains Ludovico Pratesi. "An intervention that takes on an even stronger meaning because it celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Visual Arts Center".