La Gara della Bellezza

Museion’s project room is to host Marcello Jori’s new adventure. After the series of watercolours devoted to the work of Lucio Fontana, the artist turns his characteristic passion and poetic gaze to a new challenge between art, man and nature. In the project making its debut in Museion, Jori takes on a masterpiece from the history of art, the famous “Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat.

The painting of a tranquil Sunday afternoon in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century with behatted ladies sporting parasols is an iconic image the stuff of art history textbooks and the inspiration for hundreds of postcards, prints and posters, reproduced in every form from tableau vivant to household items. In Museion’s project room visitors will be faced with multiple visions of this famous painting: the master of pointillism’s work appears in the form of a drawing, two watercolours and two large format photographs, which Jori has treated in different ways.

The artist indeed launches a challenge, a “beauty contest” between nature and art that also plays with the viewer’s perception. In the watercolours and drawing a painted snowfall “disturbs” the peaceful afternoon on the “Grande Jatte”. The snow flakes interfere with the image yet become part of it, evoking Seurat’s technique. Like a game of Chinese boxes, the photographs, on the other hand, show the reproductions of Seurat’s painting that Jori took to Paris and exposed to a real snowfall.

The question is, who will win this “beauty contest”, this challenge between paint and snow, between the pointillism of nature and the pointillism of art? With its interplay of different levels and references, the show highlights the complexity of Marcello Jori’s work, which sees him acting on one hand as artist narrator, deploying immediately comprehensible images, and venturing into performance art on the other, making conceptual use of photography.