Luigi Presicce : Le Storie della Vera Croce

The Mattatoio di Roma reopens to the public on February 9 with Le Storie della Vera Croce by Luigi Presicce, the second project in “Dispositivi sensibili” (Sensitive Devices), a three-year programme curated by Angel Moya Garcia.

The project brings together a cycle of ten episodes entitled Le Storie della Vera Croce which first saw the light of day in 2012 and which now make up a single big work being shown in its entirety for the very first time. Ten chapters comprise a total of eighteen performances presented through the medium of video recordings in which painting becomes the nerve centre of the display.

These include a new production, created by the artist in recent months as part of Prender-si cura, a production residency programme held at the Mattatoio di Roma and supported by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, which comes in addition to videos of his earlier performances.

The Le Storie della Vera Croce will pan out initially into a palimpsest consisting of six tableaux vivants around which a group of artists will be invited to create painting-from-life sessions, exploratory dialogues, a film retrospective and events developed in junction with Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti.

The Le Storie della Vera Croce cycle takes its inspiration from the eponymous story of the Holy Wood based on the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Varagine (1228–98) and on the Holy Bible. These are the two texts to which Agnolo Gaddi (1350–96) and Piero Della Francesca (1416–92) referred when producing two of the most important painted cycles in the history of Italian art in the 14th and 15th centuries, one in Santa Croce in Florence and the other in San Francesco in Arezzo. Luigi Presicce takes ten stages to review and address episodes from the story of the Holy Wood on parallel planes intermingled with historical and contemporary events and figures of social and political importance and with alchemical and esoteric symbologies. Thus the wars and conflicts that have been triggered by religious, political, cultural and economic motives throughout history come back to blight the present day which cannot shake off these ancestral issues. The uncertain times that beset us tend to spawn a daily situation that is systematically submerged beneath ceaseless attempts at destabilisation: in a search for domination, control and the enforcement of certain ideologies that marks the topical urgency of Luigi Presicce’s project for the Mattatoio di Roma exhibition spaces.

Following a research associated with often very different media such as painting and performance art, and setting mythology, history, beliefs and religion side by side, Luigi Presicce’s project alternates between the presentation of his performances in video format and obsessive research into painting. The end of the videos leads to performances, encounters and film screenings focusing on painting from life and on tableaux vivants through an eclectic tangle of quotations and echoes mixing street culture and mysteric cult, folklore and the sacred, and ancient and contemporary history in a totally free and independent fashion.

On the one hand, Presicce devotes constant attention to man and to his search for the immaterial, while on the other he offers a reflection on the role that the figure of the artist plays within that pathway. Thus the Mattatoio’s Pavilion 9b is transformed into a space inviting the visitor to build his or her own initiate’s pathway of attention to history, to knowledge and to a cultural heritage possibly now hazy yet crucial for the definition of our identity, which stands out and comes back through an aesthetic composition studied with meticulous obsession.

Dispositivi sensibili / Sensitive Devices
Luigi Presicce’s Le Storie della Vera Croce project is the second chapter in the three-year “Dispositivi sensibili” (Sensitive Devices) programme devised by Angel Moya Garcia for the Mattatoio di Roma, focusing on the convergence of method, aesthetics and practice in the visual and performance arts through a constantly evolving presentation model.

The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the institutions and people who have supported and contributed to the development of the Le Storie della Vera Croce cycle since 2012 such as Watershed/Intramoenia Extra Art, Barletta; MACRO, Roma; Arte a Capo, Gagliano del Capo (LE); The Blank, Bergamo; ArtOnTime, Castello in Movimento, Fosdinovo (MS); Museo Marino Marini, Firenze; Centrale Fies, Dro (TR); MAGA – Museo di Arte di Gallarate; Azienda Speciale Palaexpo - Mattatoio | Prender-si cura residency programme.

Special thanks go to Francesco G. Raganato and Daniele Pezzi for producing and granting use of the videos.

Le Storie della Vera Croce is part of ROMA Culture (culture.roma.it) under the guiding hand of the Department for Cultural Development.

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