From May 10th until June 2nd, 2024, the Diocesan Museum in Cremona will host the solo exhibition of architect Giorgio Palù, entitled ‘God Save Matter’.
The works and site-specific installations are hosted in the spaces that house the permanent collection and in the rooms used for temporary exhibitions of the Museum, which will be inaugurated in 2021 and for which the architect has signed the project.
An artist as well as an architect, with a strong tendency to investigate the potential of materials of an industrial nature, Giorgio Palù (Cremona 1964) has devised an exhibition project curated by Ilaria Bignotti, which accompanies the visitor in the discovery of museum, artistic and liturgical heritage in dialogue with the vibrant presence of his contemporary art.
“Every work, every installation” says Palù, “springs from the inspiration I felt in front of the works of sacred and ancient art while working on the museum project. I let myself be deeply touched by the messages, gestures, and forms that the masters of the past were able to translate into painting and sculpture to represent the ineffable and the mystery of birth and faith, life and death”.
With passion and respect, Giorgio Palù has thus punctuated the Museum with works and installations that are stages in a spiritual as well as artistic journey.
Beginning in the Museum’s first room, Palù set up In principio, composed of shining telluric fragments covered in gold leaf, recounting the tension between soul and body, in dialogue with an early Christian mosaic from the late 4th to early 5th century.
The work that is revealed later, E luce fu, also works with light, but in this case with electricity: an old lighting control panel of the Cremonese cathedral was in fact reactivated and reprogrammed by Palù to emit light signals that attract the visitor.
Another dialogue between ancient and contemporary art is represented by Red Monolith and the extraordinary Annunciation, painted in 1505 by Boccaccio Boccaccino. Its red, so dense and full of glitter, cites the colour of the Renaissance robe of the Archangel.
The itinerary continues with a figurative work: the transparency of the crucifixion is tinged with red in Transparent J, and dialogues with the works of singular value exhibited in the seventh room, such as Christ in the Garden of Olives by Battistello Caracciolo, the Crucifix of Scandolara Ravara, the oldest wooden sculpture in the Diocese of Cremona.
The dialogue continues between the touching pierced body of St. Sebastian in carved and painted wood by Giovanni Angelo del Maino, (16th century), and Giorgio Palù’s St. Sebastian: a sculpture reduced to a minimum, where the marble is twisted and stained with the mark of nails.
The material gushes and soars in Flux, an interweaving of metal filaments that recall the original use of the Museum’s large elliptical icebox, perfectly preserved.
In the following room, the crucified Christ from the Giovanni and Luciana Arvedi Buschini Collection of Sacred Art is confronted with Giorgio Palù’s With My Arms, which iconographically is an explicit homage to the late medieval Christ.
A powerful “cameo” evokes the large installation conceived and realised by Palù in the Former Church of San Carlo, in 2019: rethought for the space of the Diocesan Museum, Frattura (Recomposition), “a surprising multimedia, sound and light installation, (…) where the timeless sense of divinity, our divinity, that of the Son, clashes with the dramatic distortions of contemporary society“, wrote critic Luca Beatrice.
The exhibition is part of the schedule of Cremona Contemporanea – Art Week 2024, now in its second edition and to be held from 18th to 26th May.
For more information visit www.museidiocesicremona.it.
