The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art presents Antonello Viola 's exhibition project, a corpus of seven works that arise from the artist's personal comparison with Giulio Aristide Sartorio's masterpiece, continuously fed over the last few years up to the results of the exhibition entitled Open border on the Gorgon of Sartorio .

At the origin of Viola's project, the study of the Gallery's collections and the dialogue established with this immense heritage in the trajectories of his own artistic research, testified by the works that are the result of the encounter with a particular work, La Gorgone e gli Eroi (1897) by Giulio Aristide Sartorio .

The large canvas painted by Sartorio during his season of symbolist inspiration is exhibited inside the museum next to a diptych of preparatory sketches: it is mainly these two pastels on paper, dedicated to the study of the body of the Medusa, to which Viola is inspires for the production of some unpublished works. The terrain on which this comparison with Sartorio's work is played out is painting, in the “transcendental” form that belongs to the artist's language. Through a process of stratifications, color glazes and subsequent subtractions, the proposed “variations on the theme” return a reflection around the reference model which is an integral part of the creative process.

The works on paper created by Viola are therefore combined with Sartorio's works in the Sala della Gorgone , in full agreement with Time is Out of Joint, generating new correspondences and unprecedented combinations. With this study, reflection and restitution of a contemporary response, Antonello Viola intends to validate the imaginative power of a work of the past, characterized - in the words of Sartorio himself - by a "fatal and bewitching beauty" to highlight "two aspects of the profound vanity of human existence ".