A few days before the coronavirus decreed confinement and a state of alarm, in early March 2020, La Pedrera presented an exhibition on the photographs of William Klein. The pandemic then froze the exhibition activity of one of Antonio Gaudí's iconic buildings, a paralysis that has lasted until now. "They have been two long, very hard years," said the deputy director of the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera, Marta Lacambra, at the presentation of the exhibition that takes over from Klein and "returns a certain normality" to La Pedrera, focused on the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890-1964).
For one of the curators, Beatrice Avanzi, Morandi's intimacy, who specialized in still lifes, fits perfectly when it premieres, after covid has forced people to live with solitude and isolation. An intimacy that is accessed through portraits of his workshops, full of everyday objects that he turned into his only models. Likewise, his paintings combine with the place that hosts them, making the Italian dialogue with another artist, Gaudí, added Daniela Ferrari, curator of the exhibition, an opinion also shared by Nadia Arroyo, director of the Culture area of Fundación Mapfre, with whom the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera has co-organized it.
Morandi. Infinite Resonance, which can be visited until May 22, is a complete review of the trajectory of this Italian painter and his complexity, including a hundred works, among paintings, drawings, watercolors and engravings, of which two thirds are still lifes. Among them is one of the seven self-portraits of the artist that are preserved, which shows his reserved and solitary personality.
Known as "the painter of bottles", in his works an absolute, and recurrent, reflection on the elements of painting such as composition, form, color and light is appreciated. All this he achieves, only, through domestic objects that transmit their essence, but also harmony, and, above all, silence.
That repetition of elements is one of the reasons that gives the exhibition its name. Morandi tirelessly exercises the act of reflecting the same objects more than once, even in paintings painted in different years and decades. This does not imply monotony, Aranzi emphasizes, but an exploration of the multiple variations shown by bottles, vases, boxes, glasses, and pitchers, elements that take on their own entity and reflect the diverse moments in Morandi's work, with a different use of colors, light, and brushstrokes.
The infinite resonances are also found in the influence this painter had on future generations, an issue that was addressed in more depth in the Madrid exhibition that preceded the one in Barcelona. Despite shunning fashions and political influences, Morandi has ended up becoming a beacon for other painters due to his constant exercises in pictorial technique.
The Italian painter's still lifes also include flowers, which some say can even be smelled. Without forgetting the vase, always in the center, Morandi resorted to both those from his garden and wild ones, as well as those he made himself with paper or silk, which were the ones he gave to his friends. With such simple elements and gestures, the artist achieved eternity, as he also did with that recurrent repetition he practiced. A separate chapter deserves the landscapes he painted, only two, the courtyard he saw from his studio in Bologna and the surroundings of a town in the Apennines, also subjected to numerous variations and repetitions as if they were still lifes.