Clara Mallegni, Exhibition Ugo Guidi House Museum, Forte dei Marmi

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Clara Mallegni:

Perspicilli Stories

From 15 June to 27 June 2025

Accepted the Artsupp Card

Ugo Guidi House Museum

Via Civitali, 33 , Forte dei Marmi

Closed today: open Wednesday at 16:00

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The UgoGuidi Museum - MUG in Forte dei Marmi, in conjunction with the 200th exhibition and 20 years of activity, presents the works of Clara Mallegni entitled - Stories of Glasses, both at the museum and at the Logos Hotel, introduced by Vittorio Guidi and critically presented by Massimo Bertozzi. Mario Locatelli, president of MUG 2 in Massa, will attend with a speech on glasses. An art production linked to the contemporaneity of the male and female figure captured in a stylistic investigation that becomes evident and necessary to suggest in the search for posture, in a gesture or a gaze always concrete one's own narrative element and subject of 'conversation'. Characterized by hints of musical score or brief sentient rhythmic adagios to recall the bond with author's advertising posters, permeated by the sense of the use of collage as a form of expression - consecrated and linked to the artistic universe of placements and linguistic alternations - Clara Mallegni's works narrate to us in a modern key of identity and of important casualness in an interweaving of Stories, for an art exhibition that encompasses similarities and comparisons from the palpable stylistic content. A look of interest in the aesthetics of the 90s, in the Anglo-American fashion productions explicitly expressed and fascinatingly painted with recognizable care, the polyhedral and alluring proposals, creations of ladies in constant dynamism and lively aesthetic resolution - perspective or portraits of illustrious characters, created by Clara Mallegni, (artist and director of the museum dedicated to the master Ugo Guidi), solve and decipher interpretative schemes by posing always brilliant questions to their interlocutor. What will be the greatest tribute or moral question related to the trend and contemporaneity of a fashion of pure class, capable of balancing tradition and fun, which has always chosen and discussed its protagonism in the creative field? The answer is a parade of well-known faces of art in a grateful tribute to the community for a luxury object that transforms into a narrative subject, in a framework of intense impact lyricism, certainly formalized by modern pop currents but primarily the treatment of a long concert of studied images, of men and women, not stigmatized by time, rather captured in their polyhedricity and capacity for innovation; creations completed and graphically resolved with the mixed technique of collage and tempera that show us their ability to discern with subtle irony and conceal the qualities of true beauty and intelligible aesthetic taste, concretized in a constant discovery and reproposed with a vivid touch and accents of color - thanks to their 'flashy and evergreen' 'All-purpose sunglasses'. A motif and a choice of the Sculptor Clara Mallegni, enhanced in this exhibition that bears witness to stories of art faces, true and concrete immersions, with aesthetic reason and photographic exhibition times and manners, necessary content to not forget the sensitive value dear to the now well-known object and to designate the plastic aspect and artistic dictation consecrated to it. "We are special, we wear glasses... sang Herbert Pagani in one of his quirky excursions into the frivolous side of our pop. Yes... and who remembered it anymore? And it is easy for us to say it's quirky precisely because it is brought back to the composed youthful climate, with which the cultural market tried to adapt to the turbulent protests that shook the foundations of social rules. Quirky especially because proposed by an "agitator" of European popular culture, who was, without implying it, a Mediterranean loan, a meteco by nature, but without arrogance and without whining: born in Libya, in Tripoli, a melting pot of peoples and cultures, expelled as a child because he was Jewish, who had an early European acculturation, between Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, then recovering an affectionate homeland, in Paris first and then in Milan, "in Lombardy which is my home". A fantasy painter and visionary illustrator, and then a theater author before a chansonnier and radio and television entertainer. We owe to him, among other things, the knowledge of Jaques Brel's Le plat pays, "in Lombardy which is my home", and of Edit Piaf's Les amants d'un jour, that hourly hotel that in Italy everyone sang. It is with him that glasses, from a mocking instrument of mortification, become a poetic suggestion and an allusion to another and different way of looking at the world. There is a sculpture of his, Golden Glasses, put on with an old leather shoe to represent a face, where the ankle opening, filled with polyurethane, serves as a mouth and on top the open vamp, which serves as a nose to support a pair of yellow plastic sunglasses without lenses, and above a brush to serve as a hairstyle: a "performance" in plastic balance between ready-made and poor art, in short the clear expression of a pop soul. This sculpture resurfaced from memory while looking at Clara Mallegni's Paese dei balocchi, where the bray of the donkey resonates, emanating from a muzzle that is not properly that of a donkey, like the one acquired by Pinocchio, but a solemn, shameless and mocking donkey grin, hiding its impudence behind the lenses of a pair of expensive and branded sunglasses, and for this reason also arrogant and haughty. Where the pop idea, which is also organic to Mallegni's figurative proposition, - the plasticized face of Marilyn is a perpetual icon of an era - is embodied in the continuous re-proposition of a symbol of modernity: sunglasses, which in the case of Miss America protect the gaze from light but do not shield thoughts from the foresight of future disasters, like the tragedy of the twin towers. So these glasses are always an overlap, always a bit artificial, sometimes out of place, as well as "oversized". Like the glasses, too large and heavy, of the most famous statue of the Madonna, with lenses that show, mirror of immense pain, the image of the mother of all mothers, bent by the Pieta for the dead son, who while retaining the face of a girl, refuses to show the gaze of then, already clouded by prophetic premonitions. The same gaze as when, almost irritated by the Angel's call, she thought she could refuse the very idea of motherhood, and with it the burden of responsibilities and worries that would derive from it, as if to drive away thoughts it was enough to close the eyes behind dark lenses, not only to see beyond but also not to see... And so as much as the fold, unique, linear, still fresh from ironing, of the veil on the head of Antonello's Nunziatina, would seem to allude to clear and transparent thoughts, unlike the wrapped drapery on the head of the mother of the Vatican Pieta, what unites the two figures is the hiding of the gaze, behind glasses that are no longer a sign of attraction, but rather the desire to distance oneself from the world. So that Monna Lisa consoles herself with her "love escape", in the arms of Vincenzo Peruggia, and the Lady with an Ermine worries at the mere thought of a Monument to the needle and thread, and someone else dresses in frivolities, so that, whatever happens, life is a bit of a joke. In short, these images are not drawn but implanted for concepts, even though there cannot exist a painting of ideas alone and there must always be a "know-how" to support it, not only to assemble different objects and materials, but above all to knead and blend different techniques. Without pretending to resolve the ambiguities of the gaze, and trying to coexist with other points of view; considering that we are talking about glasses, it will be easy to accept that two simple pieces of glass sometimes function as a filter, shelter from light and intrusions from outside, and at other times as a lens, an incentive to see the world with the eyes of the mind.

	opens - closes	last entry
monday	16:00 - 16:00	16:00
tuesday	Closed now
wednesday	16:00 - 16:00	16:00
thursday	16:00 - 16:00	16:00
friday	16:00 - 16:00	16:00
saturday	16:00 - 16:00	16:00
sunday	Closed now

Clara Mallegni:

Perspicilli Stories

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