Love: Contemporary Art Meets Amour

Art is always a great declaration of love. Consider the tragic images of a crucifixion, the moving embrace of the Sarcophagus of the spouses at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, the spectral whiteness of Christ's corpse of Mantegna at the Pinacoteca di Brera, the dramatic and secret truth of the Raiser of Géricault, the sweet and silent abandonment of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, the invading flesh and in the deformed faces of Freud and Bacon, the shocking head of Quinn's son made with his mother's blood and placenta. They are all profound and desperate declarations of love: to the value of sacrifice as a path of salvation, to conjugal life that challenges the transience of time, faith in resurrection and spiritual joys, to the stubborn struggle for an uncomfortable and denied truth, to abandonment and silence of a solitude full of memories, to the joy of a new life that goes through pain to face the world. See it in the evocative scenography of classical Greek theater, in the indescribable face of Santa Teresa wrapped by the marble fluctuations of Bernini, in the soft dialogue of "Quia respexit" between oboe and soprano for Bach's Magnificat, in the young and casual Demoiselles of Picasso's "Rue d'Avignon," in the theosophical balance of the colors of Mondrian or in the atmospheres of a Rothko.

Through the works of the most important artists of contemporary art — among others Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Tracey Moffatt, Francesco Clemente, Marc Quinn, Gilbert & George, Francesco Vezzoli, Vanessa Beecroft - and essays by Danilo Eccher, Federico Vercellone, Pierangelo Sequeri, Mattia Fumanti and Woody Allen, the volume deals with one of the universally recognized feelings which has always been a source of investigations and representations, Love, telling the different facets and infinite declinations. A happy, anticipated, misunderstood, hated, ambiguous, transgressive, childish love that unfolds along an unconventional exhibition path, characterized by visual and perceptive inputs.