A 32-meter brightly colored
canvas, as if it were a fresco on the roof of the Toro Farnese,
greets visitors to the exhibition 'In the Volcano, Cai Guo-Qiang
and Pompeii'.
The exhibition by the Chinese artist, who has won the Golden
Lion at the Venice Biennale, will be at the Naples National
Archaeological Museum until May 20. There was still the smell
of gunpowder on Thursday after a spectacular "explosion" on
Wednesday in the Pompeii amphitheater. The works immediately
'excavated' - canvases of different sizes and copies of everyday
objects from antiquity, as well as reproductions of famous MANN
sculptures - just after the Pompeii performance have been spread
around the museum halls, from the Farnese collection to the
frescoes section, from the atrium to the mosaics, to tell of an
indissoluble link between the past and present and between
Eastern and Western cultures. Also on display are paintings
using gunpowder that had been created in New York and at the end
of the route a boat, anchored to the wall and flanked by Pompeii
frescoes. "When the eruption of Vesuvius buried ancient
civilization, nature created a masterpiece through catastrophe,
preserving monumental heritage like a time-space capsule," Cai
Guo-Qiang said. The project received organizational support
from Fondazione Morra.
"Thanks to the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, folklore, allusions and
the power of Oriental traditions are located, overwhelming, in
the halls of MANN, proving that cultural sharing is born from an
analogous capacity to look at the world with a sense of
curiosity of which people in ancient times spoke," museum
director Paolo Giulierini said, noting that MANN also has an
current exhibition on archaeology of the ancient Sichuan until
March 11 that bears witness to unremitting dialogue with China.
"The artist found in the culture and history of Naples and
Campania new ways to realize his 'explosion paintings'," said
curator Jérme Neutres. "This dialogue is seen in the set
design of the exhibition, with Cai Guo-Qiang's works inside the
collections, including those of Pompeii, in a sort of treasure
hunt, a back and forth between the past and the present," he
said. On Thursday there was an immense crowd for the
"artistic explosion" that opened the exhibition in Pompeii.
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