The exhibition Like a burning flame. Dante's Comedy according to Aligi Sassu (4 September 2021 - 9 January 2022), organized by the Municipality of Bagnacavallo in collaboration with the Aligi Sassu Archive, will exhibit the cycle of over 110 pictorial works, not exposed to the public in its entirety for over twenty years.

An all-round artist, Aligi Sassu over the course of his career has repeatedly tried his hand at illustrating the great texts of Italian and foreign literature. By his own admission, the long confrontation of the Comedy was nevertheless a unique experience «not an illustrative proof of pure representation, but a dramatic determined action. Sinking the scalpel into the living flesh of my painting ». In fact, the Milanese artist's intention was not to slavishly illustrate Dante's songs, but to get in tune with Dante himself and with the atmosphere one breathes while reading the Poem. To achieve this goal Aligi Sassu, thanks to the intense and vivid acrylic colors, gives life to a series of works that transform the musicality of the famous triplets into an exciting chromatic symphony.

The element that characterizes the Milanese artist since his beginnings is color, the undisputed protagonist also of the suite of Dante tables. They are bright colors that transcend the rules of reality and immerse you in an emotional universe suitable for representing the complexity of the Comedy.

As for Dante the confrontation with the damned and the blessed is an opportunity for meditation and assessment of his own life, so for Sassu, now at the threshold of 70 years, the many souls of the Poem lead him to probe his personal and artistic life. Parallel to the human participation of the painter in the face of the existential questions that arise from the reading of the famous triplets, in Dante's tables one can find an echo of the different artistic phases crossed by Sassu, from the initial and brief adhesion to Futurism, to the period of the Red Men , to the production of sacred art.