Museo: Mostra Teatralità - Architettura per la meraviglia

Introduction to the Exhibition with the Curator

Entering for the first time the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, or the San Carlo in Naples produces the same astonishment that ignites upon our entry into St. Peter's in Rome, St. Mark's in Venice, or a grand mosque like Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The same wonder is evoked by the grandeur of the Bourbon palace in Caserta or that of the Savoy in Venaria, also "spaces on stage," examples of how architecture has always reinvented space, fulfilling practical functions while simultaneously serving symbolic and representational purposes. Patrizia Mussa has refined her photographer's eye over time, along with her technique and poetics, and today she arrives at an expressive maturity that has few equals on the international scene. We conceived the exhibition "Theatricality - Architecture for Wonder" to share the journey that Patrizia Mussa and I have been undertaking for some years among Italian theaters and the most spectacular architectures of princely palaces and churches. Mussa captures with her delicate eye and the tip of her photographic lens the internal or external volumes before her, then imprints them on cotton paper, and again intervenes with pastel retouching. The works produced in this research are pure visual epiphanies, surprising two-dimensional impressionisms of three-dimensional architectures, in which the chromaticism of Canaletto and Guardi seem to merge with the subtle textures of Piranesi's drawings, with a touch of Panini-like spectacularity. Patrizia Mussa thus accompanies us on a Journey through Italy, on a renewed Grand Tour, made of "wonders of wonders": her shots of already scenic architectures are transfigured even more thanks to a technique that has become her "language" over time. The result is unprecedented, almost metaphysical, phantasmagorical, impressionistic figurations. The theaters and other architectures photographed and reworked by Mussa are formal quintessences, visual poetry, pictorial existentialism without human figures. Theatrical architectures are among the most amazing that human ingenuity has developed: whether it's a Greek theater, carved into the side of a hill two thousand five hundred years ago, or an eighteenth-century box theater, these are always architectures for the polis, places to gather, devices for seeing and being seen, machines that ignite wonder. And humans have always needed wonder to emancipate themselves from the sometimes brutal concreteness of reality, to interpret or magnify it. Historically, theaters are social agoras, secular temples, buildings where the imaginary is exercised, places where the intangible can surface, realms of vision and listening, of acting and music, of reality replicated on stage, and at the same time, they are "liminal spaces" where it is possible to touch the mystery hidden behind things. From ancient theater to the "Italian-style theater" to twentieth-century experiments, it's all a succession of variants that have led to different solutions each time, including temporary setups in palaces, courtyards, gardens, and squares. And it is precisely in this "welcoming" that one of the functions of this architecture is realized: it is here that the community converges to substantiate its cohesion, its self-representation. The semicircle of the ancient theater is a perfect form for seeing and listening, one next to the other, in a ritual that refers to democracy, participation, sharing. From the mid-seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "our" box theater will be the protagonist, exported throughout Europe and the Americas: when the architecture of the hall is complete with its inhabitants, a true "living architecture," then the gaze can turn towards the stage to begin the ritual of mirroring or epiphany. Patrizia Mussa's research on "theatrical architectures" had its first important public exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in December two thousand twenty-three, then at Villa Zito in Palermo in two thousand twenty-four, in Paris in the early months of this two thousand twenty-five, in the neoclassical rooms of the Hotel de Galliffet (the first headquarters of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the aftermath of the Revolution, Monsieur Talleyrand's bureau), and today at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, one of the highest inventions of our Renaissance. The Basilica is portrayed by Mussa for this new exhibition strongly desired by the Gemmo family (whom I wish to thank here for their patronage), reaching a further refinement of her expressive language. We like to think that the visitor to this exhibition, having completed the exhibition path, will be even more intrigued by these "architectures of wonder," will want to return to visit them as special monuments, to inhabit them again with greater awareness of their genesis and function. Because if it's true that dreams vanish at dawn, it's also true that human ingenuity, as an antidote to the transience of beauty, has built theaters. To continue dreaming with open eyes and in full consciousness. The curator Antonio Calbi