Furiosamente

Giovanna Ricotta

a cura di Maria Livia Brunelli e Silvia Grandi

Intoduction

The staff of Giovanna Ricotta will open on Saturday, April 16 at 5 pm "Furiosamente. The women, the knights, weapons, the loves ", at the MLB Maria Livia Brunelli Ferrara home gallery. The artist, performer and photographer of great refinement, in parallel to the exhibition at the MLB, will realize, on May 12, a performance at the MAMbo of Bologna.
The project of the artist inaugurates the cycle of exhibitions inspired by Ludovico Ariosto and in particular to his most famous poem, the "Orlando Furioso", which this year is the fifth year of the first edition. Conceived in Ferrara Estense and printed in the city in 1516, the poem is one of the absolute masterpieces of Western literature and immediately spoke to the heart of Italian and European readers. To celebrate it, a series of initiatives and exhibitions involving the entire city of Ferrara, which will culminate, in September, in a major exhibition that Palazzo dei Diamanti will dedicate to this masterpiece of Italian literature of the sixteenth century. Not a documentary exhibition or pictorial fortune, but a real art exhibition that will lead the visitor on a fascinating journey through the pages of the poem, including battles and tournaments, knights and loves, wishes and spells, through a selection of masterpieces of the greatest artists of the period, from Giovanni Bellini to Andrea Mantegna, from Giorgione to Dosso Dossi, from Raffaello to Leonardo, from Michelangelo to Titian. Alongside these, ancient and Renaissance sculptures, engravings, tapestries, weapons, books and artifacts of extraordinary beauty and preciousness, will revive the fantastic knightly world of Furioso and its paladins, offering at the same time a suggestive slice of Ferrara in which the book and recounting dreams, desires and fantasies of that society of the Italian courts of the Renaissance in which Ariosto was a very sensitive spokesman.
A poem that continues to speak to the contemporary reader for the incredible timeliness of the themes dealt with: the need for harmony and serenity, contradicted by the constant tension towards impossible goals, such as the desire for glory, ambition, unfulfilled love, all chimeras that create jealousy and anxiety, even to lead to obsession, madness. But the poem also speaks of an era of strong religious crisis, of the war between the Arab world and the Christian world, a conflict that has never shaken our consciences like today. Red threads that cross our era as they crossed that of Ariosto, who himself, a lover of peace and inner peace, denounces in his poem, so that the "Orlando Furioso" is configured as a great metaphor of intrigues and follies of he was a spectator every day at the Este court.
In the desire to reflect on the relevance of the Ariosto's poem, the MLB home gallery asked some artists to deal with these issues to deepen the aspect of the poem that everyone felt strongly linked to their own poetics. Giovanna Ricotta, who inaugurates the cycle, has always worked on the theme of the body and the different personalities that, madly, coexist in the same person, because in her performances and leading photographs she is herself, even if in continuous metamorphosis that make her unrecognizable. On the basis of this reflection, Ricotta proposes a contrast between the world of knights and that of the ladies, starting from the first, very famous verse of the poem: "Women, knights, weapons, loves". Thus, the intense photographs of herself in the performance presented at MAMbo in 2010, which portray her as a technological warrior in a contrast of whites and blacks (Do the right thing), dialogue with the refined and powdered ones that see her in the eighteenth century damsel in the work Toilette.
From the coexistence of these two souls that coexist in the same person, a masculine and a feminine, a dynamic and a static, comes the reflection of “Furiosamente”, an inedited series of 46 drawings, as many as the songs of Ariosto's poem. The title aims to evoke the schizophrenic dimension of this search for body identity, of which the design, sometimes fine and clean, sometimes dirty and violent, becomes a symbol. Giovanna Ricotta thus "furiously" expresses the story of an uncontainable, passionate, strong contemporary body that can’t hold back poetry, rather it must express it as in the "Orlando Furioso", without filters. A poem screamed, without shame, but with elegance, because if the photograph shows, the drawings instead whisper, as the voice that will penetrate the silence of the exhibition halls, suggesting a reading of the works: “SEMPRE COME AL SOSPIRARE/UN ATTIMO DI PAUSA DEL CORPO/ ENORME E’ LA SUA FOLLIA.../E... RESPIRA”.