Luigi Ontani

Galleria dello Scudo, Verona
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1996

Venice, XLVI Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, 1995, p. 45, no. 10
Verona, Galleria dello Scudo, Idea Aida del Vero Diffida opere di Luigi Ontani 1980-1995, 1995-1996
Bologna, MAMBO, Museum of modern Art, Luigi Ontani: GiganteRazzEtàArtiCentAuro, 2008, p. 116-7, illustrated in colour

Marisa Vescovo, Luigi Ontani. Padiglione italiano, in "Tema Celeste", Siracusa 1995, no. 53-54

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: this work is in very good condition.
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Ornately resplendent in colour and medium, the luxuriously crafted ErmEstEtica HarlemArlecchino embodies the essence of Luigi Ontani's multidisciplinary artistic career.  Emerging on the Italian art scene at the onset of the 1970s, Ontani initially gained recognition for his reaction against the metaphysical ruminations of Arte Povera.  Signalling a paradigm-shift in Italian art, Ontani's broad conceptual approach marked an artistic "transition from explosion to implosion", via a proto-kitsch appropriation of archetypes across the breadth of western art history, mythology, and folklore. (Renato Barilli, 'Arte Povera, conceptual art, multimedia', in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Arte Italiana 1960-1982, 1983, p. 29).  In typically employing his own body and visage as the constant gravitational centre of his work, performance, photography, sculpture, painting and printmaking facilitate a dream-like re-imagination of a plurality of cultural identities anchored by the artist's own narcissistic self-referentiality.  Dating back to the very earliest origins of Italian cultural heritage borne of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the artistic paragon of transformation is thematized in Ontani's transhistoric fictional reincarnations.  Dante, Saint Sebastian, Bacchus, Medusa and Arlecchino constitute the mainstay of Ontani's identity transmutations.  Initially staging tableau vivant performances and filming and photographing himself role-playing these diverse characters, Ontani later produced a series of busts and life-sized ceramic embodiments, to which the present work belongs.