POETICA_ Arrigo Lora Totino
27 October_16 December 2017

Curated by Valerio Dehò and Pasquale Fameli??

More than fifty works went trough the creative arch of Arrigo Lora Totino, artist, poet, speaker of historic avant-gardes beginning from Futurism of whom curated an indispensable anthology in 1978.Totino passed away in 2016, he has been a pioneer of experimental poetry, but he started with painting, at first figurative then aniconic, in a city like Turin that between the end of the fifties and the sixties was becoming one of the capitals of Italian art. The artist and poet always had a special attention for concretism, an art that creates new meanings starting from released signs, from colors that have no pre-established meaning. For this reason concrete poetry deviate its meaning to the form of words, elaborating the “concrete material” of a language decomposed in its last units-syllables, letters, phonemes-and reconstructed as “literary material” according to new forms and new rules. Material and compatibility are the two standards also in the spoken form of poetry. Arrigo Lora Totino was a tireless performer, he often was actor of its poems. His will to experiment and its irony made him one of the most important personalities of the new-avant-gardes in Europe. A section of the exhibition was dedicated to videos of his public actions and it was also exposed an unpublished serie of photos that portrait him, realized by the famous photographer of Milan Fabrizio Garghetti. The esthetic instruments of Totino were often tied with the paper and the book, with the awareness that culture need a universal and concrete support to be spread. Already in 1964-1968 Lora Totino realized object-books like the”Cromofonemi”(1967-2000), but known and important are the most recent works of the cicle “Fiore della prosa” where the book became a sculpture that highlight the form and the word. To comprehend how much the artist from Turin was identified with the role of continuer of historic avant-gardes, in the exhibition were present ten works named “Macchine celibi”, reclaiming the famous definition of the most emblematic work of Marcel Duchamp, “Il grande vetro”. Those are works where mechanic fragments of clocks, transistor radios, all types of machines, a variety of hardware, are disposed in a way that formed compositions in relation to collage of other machines or elements coming from mathematic and calculation world. The first “version” was dated to 2009, and in this assembly the word leave the place to objects, actually to their parts. As always, Arrigo Lora Totino created clue works, he elaborated a poetic of the fragment that is under the responsibility of the observer to complete, because the role of the artist is the one of creating new enigmas by the realization of works open to the reading of public. During the exposition was created a catalogue with texts of Valerio Dehò and Pasquale Fameli. The exhibition was realized in collaboration with the “Archivio Lora Totino” and the “Fondazione Berardelli”.

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