Lara Ilaria Braconi, Virginia Dal Magro, Ginevra Dolcemare, Graziano Folata, Anna Mangone. Organised by The Italian Cultural Institute. Curated by Academy of Fine Arts Brera, Milan Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices. Professors Raffaella Pulejo, Giovanni Iovane. Students Giulia Bassoli, Eugenio Martino Nesi.
22 – 31 March 2017
“The title of this exhibition comes from a passage of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (act 1, scene 5): “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood…”. The idiomatic expression refers to youth as a time of inexperience accompanied by enthusiasm and idealism, and in this exhibition it recalls by extension the archetype of Senex and Puer, as developed by the psychologist James Hillman. Saturn and Mercury, personification of Senex and Puer, are archetypal figures of the inner life of the individual but they also work as metaphors of the dynamic life of social institutions. (…) In the narrative of the exhibition, the Academy of Brera plays the role of Saturn/Senex archetype and embodies the principle of authority derived from its historical lineage. The fine arts students that every days inhabit the Brera Academy, represent the “Salad days” of the institution, in the past as well as in the present days”. Giovanni Iovane, Raffaella Pulejo
“Lara Ilaria Braconi in her research tries to put herself in a position where she can understand the deep essence of things from the inside, experimenting different languages in the tradition of modern painting. In the work presented in this show, she confronted her method with the “cold” genre of the monochrome, exploiting its potential to create an emotional and naturalistic space (a green field) with the minimum of descriptive means. Her wide painting is realized in different stretches of time, during multiple “automatic” and intuitive attempts, embodied in the different layers of painted material which built the final surface”. Eugenio Martino Nesi
