Reflections on time and the reinterpretation of the famous funeral monument to Ilaria Del Carretto made by Jacopo della Quercia. These are the themes addressed by the Lucca artist Roberto Baronti in his solo show entitled “Modern Ilaria. The present of the past ”, curated by Maurizio Vanni, exhibited in the Lu.CCA Lounge & Underground (free admission) from 25 January to 15 March 2020.

That of Baronti, as a witness of his own time, is not only narrative, but also lucid provocation. The series of works he proposes - which are synthetic images - are not quotations, reinterpretations, tributes, representations or decontextualizations of the figure of Ilaria, but an original proposal that Sant'Agostino would define "The present of the past". Baronti brings back emotional, intellectual and sensorial experiences from his memorial archive and adds his visionary nature to all this. “It connotes the 'Modern Ilaria' - explains the curator Maurizio Vanni - in contexts that are implausibly possible, improbable, credible, fantastic and, at the same time, so close to the interpretation of a digital world that tries not to suppress our identity".

It is as if the artist placed a filter on memories and set out from there to redesign existence. “Baronti - continues Vanni - does not want to question the present, on the contrary he tries to exalt it starting from a known image of the past. His images offer us, in an absolutely original time zero, a compositional system that is only apparently classical violated by an element that, in the past, has connoted the perceptive priority of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art: light. Space is almost always as decisive as the figures, it is never 'occupied' by chance and gives rhythm to the energies released by the combination of forms ".

In all this story Ilaria turns out to be a pretext, a suggestion or a comparative iconographic element that "urges us to imagine, to trust the invisible, trying to transform the 'beauty of forms' into a tool to explode the veil of Maya that encrypts all things of the world ". Baronti reminds us that we all naturally have a special machine for traveling through time: memories to go to the past, dreams to move towards the future.