Giorgio Morandi. Il tempo sospeso (Giorgio Morandi. Time suspended) endeavors to present Morandi as a figure deeply rooted in the twentieth century, both as a man and an artist, living through two world wars and feeling the weight of disillusionment, the loss of references, the defeat of every belief. To stem the drift of human, the painter strove to establish a mental equilibrium, a harmony of forms, where materiality metamorphoses into luminosity. Yet, this quest for order does not obliterate the undercurrent of uncertainty that permeates each of his compositions, transmuting into a sense of anticipation and suspension.
Giorgio Morandi’s painting has always been associated with silence, as silent was the intimate daily relationship he had with the inanimate subjects, always the same even years later, of his still life compositions. The curator Marilena Pasquali defines the strength of Morandi’s art with these words: “Putting reality in brackets to be able to live it. Rarely has an artist been able to convey all this mix of reason and feeling fused together as Giorgio Morandi did with his compositions of objects, his glimpses of nature, his silk flowers: images that appear so neutral and in reality, so strong, so empty of men and so full of humanity. Morandi is an artist on the edge, always balanced on the threshold of a time and a world that is changing at great speed, and as such today it is more necessary than ever, in this difficult and ever faster, elusive and often incomprehensible time”.
The volume presents a selection of paintings and works on paper from the 1920s to the 1960s that trace Morandi’s career, to deepen the knowledge of his “difficult and secret art”, to paraphrase Cesare Brandi. The close juxtaposition of some of Morandi’s variants and the exhibitions of some unpublished documents unearthed from the artist’s family archives highlights new critical ideas.