| RENATO RANALDI | Biography | |
| Angolari 1973/74 Scioperii 2015 Contenzioso 2016 | Catalogs | |
| curated by BRUNO CORA’ | ||
| 19 november – 30 december 2016 |
Galleria Il Ponte inaugurates an exhibition by Renato Ranaldi presenting three sets of works from different periods. In chronological order, it starts from the Angolari works (1973-74) installed in the basement of the gallery. Consisting of two canvases placed alongside each other to create a corner [angolo] that acts as a theatre wing, the featured objects – real or represented – seem to upset and call into question the two dimensions of the pictorial medium, preferring to invent a non-conventional spatiality. Instead, on the ground floor the walls are “carpeted” with drawings in black Indian ink on paper. These are a selection of the thirty-two Scioperíi collected in the book of the same name alongside a tale by Ranaldi himself and an afterword by Bruno Corà. Published by Edizioni Gli Ori in 2016, the volume will be presented by Bruno Corà, Marco Meneguzzo and Angelika Stepken, again on Saturday 19 November, at the Museo di Antropologia ed Etnografia in Florence. On these papers the artist traces his own personal language of lazy and carefree little drawings or sketches (“scioperíi”) arranged in a “burlesque” manner on the edges of the page. While the term may appear somewhat bizarre and made up, as Bruno Corà testifies in a letter to Ranaldi it is instead used in a restoration manual to indicate those graphic interludes playfully scribbled in the margin, mixed with the sinopia planning stage and the margins of codices and notarial acts. As the artist states, “…I opted for the biblical text of the blank page which can only be polluted by scioperíi – signs like flares, flashes of inspiration, on its edge…These scioperíi come about by frequenting the shady, risky areas of my brain, traps that I am incapable of avoiding. They are reverberations of resuscitated thoughts, they ask to resolve the enigmas that they themselves have produced and cannot unpick”.
At the entrance to the gallery, our gaze is met from the back wall by a large work created especially for this exhibition: Contenzioso (2016). Two blank, equal-size canvases are linked and united by what the title of the work itself suggests is the object of a dispute [contenzioso]: a shapeless polychrome agglomeration of oil colours. Ranaldi’s umpteenth slap in the face to the artwork’s central focus, a decentralization, a shift to the edge of the attention and narrative.
