Mario Schifano, Roman by birth and Sicilian by his father, is one of the main exponents of European Pop Art. Like all the artists of that pleasure-seeking and revolutionary period that was the 60s of the last century, Schifano uses a language rich in contents and expressive forms typical of mass communication and so-called popular culture. He fully lives his time and the desire to undertake new paths and challenges by interacting with the media, with rock and pop bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, experimenting with drugs, traveling with curiosity between London and New York and appropriating marketing techniques, thus transforming his works into icons of a new world and a new art.

The exhibition “Mario Schifano. I'm on fire! " Works from the Ovidio Jacorossi Collection returned by fire , will be inaugurated at Palazzo Sant'Elia on 19 December 2021, at 5.30 pm, and will remain on display until 28 February 2022 .

The approximately thirty works belonging to the "Fires of Art", set up in the splendid rooms of Palazzo Sant'Elia mainly belong to the Jacorossi collection, created by the entrepreneur and patron Ovidio Jacorossi, a great art collector who died two years ago. These are also impressive paintings united by the common thread of a singular destiny: they were reached by the heat of a fire that broke out in 1992 in a carpentry in San Lorenzo, not far from where they were kept. The red thread is precisely the fire of that stake, a fire that brings destruction and death or that generates eternal energy.

The irruption of chance, the unexpected, the fate that reshapes the works with the burns, making them magnificent. In fact, when the artist saw them contaminated by the flames he exclaimed: “Don't touch them, they are more beautiful than before”. Those burns therefore tell a particular story that this exhibition wants to remember.