The GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo presents RAPTUS, a site-specific project by the artist Marcello Maloberti. This exhibition is the biggest ever dedicated by an Italian museum to the artist, who was born in 1966 and lives and works in Milan.
His work has always been a playful and bizarre mix of multifarious expressive modes ranging from installations to performance art, from photography to sculpture, from urban intervention to collage as well as drawing and video.
Contradictory feelings and different formal strategies overlap one another within his visual universe and come in a kaleidoscope of forms: while on the one hand everydayness is staged with irony and melancholy, on the other his realism is based on the fantastic, in a continuous transformation of the most banal aspects of existence.
Maloberti represents life as the kingdom of the unforeseeable and manifold, like a RAPTUS –or fit of madness – an unexpected and incontrollable action, a sudden explosion of energy and vitality.
Marcello Maloberti creates spaces with the most disparate and heterogeneous elements: chairs made of plastic and little radios, ceramic tigers, flowers, peddlers’ tents and shells are assembled in an extravagant and apparently chaotic manner. These ephemeral universes host everyday people who are invited to carry out minor and surreal actions or, more simply, to don the trappings of incongruous apparitions. His is a Theater of the Absurd that consists of moments of intimacy and silence and sudden bursts of noise and eccentricity, where an absolutely Italian repertory of images from Federico Fellini to Pierpaolo Pasolini is interwoven with an extreme and vital portrait of our current social reality. In his images, in fact, the city becomes a place suspended between play and enigma, where the ethnic and cultural mix of today’s cities produces a gallery of contemporary portraits.
RAPTUS is a powerful installation consisting of objects, sounds, lights and images that create a multiplicity of landscapes – rural, urban and human – that fit into one another like Chinese boxes, and expand until they dominate GAMeC’s spaces. Even in this case, the public space becomes a kind of psychological portrait, the interior dimension invades the landscape, as if the latter were a screen of subjective projection.
Many of the works on display center on the collage as a device, that is not merely technical but, and above all, an operative means lying at the base of all Marcello Maloberti’s work. The vitality with which the images and the forms cohabit and overlap within his work, appears as an extension of the combinatory practice of collage, as if all reality were the object of sampling and alignment under the sign of perceptive disorder, formal similarity and linguistic paradox.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the most exhaustive monograph ever dedicated to the artist, with essays by Sabine Folie(Director of the Generali Foundation in Vienna), by Martin Herbert (European Editor of Modern Painters), by the curator of the exhibitionAlessandro Rabottini and a conversation between Marcello Maloberti and Caroline Corbetta (critic and independent curator).
This exhibition is part of a series in honor of Arturo Toffetti.
Curated by: Alessandro Rabottini