With the Montarsolo exhibition. High tension between past and present curated by Giorgio Agnisola , the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art pays homage to the artist on the centenary of his birth and on the occasion of the recent donation of his archive to the National Gallery . Carlo Montarsolo represented a significant presence in the framework of post-World War II artistic research aimed at reconciling geometric and tendentially abstract synthesis - at times neo-Cubist and even informal - with traditional expressions.

The identity code of the artist's language emerges in particular from this reference to tradition, readable as the legacy of a Neapolitan and southern landscape culture, which fueled his youth formation, characterized by soft and mellow colors and vibrant highlights of light. It is above all in the sign of a strong, unresolved tension between past and present that between the end of the fifties and the seventies of the past century, the time span on which the exhibition is focused, the artist witnessed a peculiar and happy path that, in the panorama of the artists of the same period, it makes it absolutely recognizable, with results of suggestive expressive intensity. 

Works such as Tempio sommerso (1967), in which the constructive datum, while remaining an essential texture of the image, is absorbed, so to speak, by the multiple cuts of light, evoking mysterious and almost magical and internal harmonies, contrasting with more introverted and material works, tendentially symbolic, such as Sole sul sillale (1962) and Elementi di una machine (1979), characterized by calibrated scans of planes and shapes, sometimes by underlying and intimate games of lights and shadows. Emblematically, the works of Montarsolo present in the exhibition intertwine a precious dialogue with selected works, coming from the collections of the Gallery, by contemporary artists such as Lucio Del Pezzo, Umberto Mastroianni, Augusto Perez.