There are artists who look at the past with nostalgia and develop strong bonds with specific art periods and movements, but Italian artist Luca Pignatelli is not interested in borrowing from the past, but in creating chronological disruptions and contaminations with the present, keeping an eye on the possibilities that the future may offer.
In his latest works - on display until today at the Stefano Bardini Museum in Florence as part of the exhibition "Senza Data" (Undated) - Pignatelli attempted a sort of journey through time and space.
He came up with a series of prints on railway tarpaulin, wood, paper and metal sheets, but also recreated paintings of classical statues on Persian carpets.
These images from classical times are summoned from the past, like ghosts trying to dialogue with the other works on display in the museum, from Tino da Camaino's 14th century "Charity" to Donatello's Madonna of the Apple and Madonna of the Ropemakers, Bernardo Daddi's Crucifixion, Antonio del Pollaiolo's St. Michael Archangel and "Atlas" by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri.
Pignatelli's carpets are the most interesting pieces of his latest production: apart from going well with the museum carpet collection and with the colours of the walls in the museum trademark "Bardini blue" (a shade the art dealer and collector brought back from one of his trips to Russia and that later on became the symbol of the museum), these new pieces allow the artist to look at the concept of time via sculptures, paintings and textiles, and create a sort of stratification of techniques, times and cultures (it is worth noting that, in some cases, the artist incorporated his stratified textiles into the tapestry of chairs or integrated them inside a wooden cabinet).
Visitors standing in front of the colourful rugs will indeed be able to contemplate not just one historical period, but time as a layered concept.
The historical time of the creation of the statues replicated on the carpets and the time of the creation of the carpets overlap to provide visitors with new collective memories. In a way Pignatelli's "undated" carpets are to be interpreted as mobile and nomadic artworks: they can be taken off the wall, rolled and easily transported somewhere else.
Pignatelli's exhibition is part of the promotional events organised by the local authorities to promote the collections at the Bardini Museum and, judging from some of the artworks on display in its spaces, it would be definitely worthwhile rediscovering them.
In the meantime expect Pignatelli's images of classical statues on Persian rugs to become the subject of a fashion collaboration: the more you look at them, the more you feel that these exercises in appropriations and stratifications wouldn't look out of place on sweats, T-shirts and scarves (somehow they do call to mind collaged prints à la Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy...).
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