PRESENTAZIONE | LUCA BERTOLO: L’HÉSITATION
9 april, h. 18.30 – 20.00
Accademy of France in Rome – Villa Medici, Viale della Trinità dei Monti, 1, Roma
IUNO, Roma e Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis present the book Luca Bertolo. L’hésitation, published on the occasion of the dual solo exhibition held in France at the CEAAC in Strasbourg and the Atelier Meisenthal in Meisenthal, Lorraine, curated by Elena Volpato.
The volume traces an anthological journey through over twenty years of Luca Bertolo’s painting, interpreting it through the concept of hesitation, a term the artist borrows from a sentence by Nicolas de Staël who, in a 1953 letter to Pierre Lecuire, wrote:
Il n’y a que deux choses valables en art:
1° La fulgurance de l’autorité
2° La fulgurance de l’hésitation.
C’est tout. L’un est fait de l’autre, mais au sommet les deux se distinguent très clairement.
De Staël’s words encapsulate a long trajectory within European culture, which culminated in the last century with the transition from the so-called grand style of the past to the awareness that it is no longer possible to conceive an artwork as organic and self-contained, as the mirror of an all-encompassing experience of reality. The very essence of modernity coincides with the impossibility of totality—an essence that is, in fact, an absence, a void at the center left by the disappearance of any foundation.
Hesitation is this, but it is also the moment of surprise and contemplation that artists sometimes experience when confronted with unexpected openings that occur in the process of creating an artwork. It is both stumble and possibility, an awareness of the coexistence of multiple and contradictory meanings.
It is a central theme in much of contemporary painting and art, where it emerges as an open attitude toward the work—according to the dimensions of the unfinished, of dissonance, of ambiguity: all expressions of the irreducible complexity of the present.
Speakers: Luca Bertolo, Davide Ferri e Elena Volpato
Luca Bertolo (Milan, 1968) studied computer science at the State University of Milan and later painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 1998. He has lived in São Paulo, London, Berlin, and Vienna. Since 2005 he has resided in a small mountain hamlet in the Apuan Alps. He has participated in exhibitions in public and private spaces including GAM, Turin; MART, Rovereto; Aalst Netwerk, Aalst; MAN, Nuoro; Fondazione del Monte; Bologna; Fondazione Prada, Milan; GAM, Turin; GNAM, Rome; Centro Pecci, Prato; Nomas Foundation, Rome; 176/Zabludowicz Collection, London; MACRO, Rome; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; SpazioA, Pistoia; Arcade, London/Brussels; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; Galerie Perrotin, Paris; Pierogi Gallery, New York. His first anthological exhibition was held at CEAAC, Strasbourg, in 2024. Some of his articles, which have appeared in magazines and blogs, have found their way into the book I baffi del bambino. Scritti sull’arte e sugli artisti(The Child's Moustache. Writings on art and artists), Quodlibet, 2018. He edited the Italian edition of On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, by James Elkins, Johan & Levi, 2024 and recently wrote the afterword to the italian edition of Raphael Rubinstein's book Pittura provvisoria. Una svolta nell’arte contemporanea(Provisional Painting. A Turning Point in Contemporary Art), Johan & Levi, 2022. He has been teaching painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna since 2015.
Davide Ferri (Forlì, 1974) lives in Rome. He is the Artistic Director of Arte Fiera, Bologna, and Professor of Museography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He curated the “Pittura XXI” section of Arte Fiera from 2019 to 2025. He has worked regularly as a curator with Palazzo De’ Toschi – Banca di Bologna and with Fondazione Coppola in Vicenza. Since 2012, he has been the curator of the Art Section of the Ipercorpo theatre festival. He has curated numerous exhibitions and projects in contemporary art galleries and museums, including: Peggy Franck, In a Naked Room, Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2025; Hm, He, Ha (with Elena Volpato) / Luca Bertolo, Manuele Cerutti, Pesce Khete, Michele Tocca, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, 2024; Patrick Tuttofuoco, Abbandona gli occhi, Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2024; Quadri come luoghi, an exhibition across five venues organized on the occasion of Bergamo Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023; Bettina Buck, Finding Form, Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2023; Italo Zuffi, Fronte e retro (with Lorenzo Balbi), Museo MAMbo e Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2022; Markus Schinwald – Misfits, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, 2020; Le realtà ordinarie, Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2020; Neo Rauch – Rosa Loy, La Torre, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, 2019; Solo figura e sfondo / Courtesy Emilia Romagna, Arte Fiera, Bologna, 2019; Afro. Pensieri nella mano, Musei San Domenico di Forlì, 2015; Tutta l’Italia è silenziosa, Villa Massimo – Accademia Tedesca, Accademia Reale di Spagna, Ambasciata del Brasile, Istituto Polacco, Centro Russo di scienza e cultura, Roma, 2015; Franco Guerzoni – Nessun luogo, da nessuna parte. Viaggi randagi con Luigi Ghirri, Triennale di Milano, 2014; La figurazione inevitabile. Una scena della pittura oggi, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 2013; Sentimiento Nuevo (con Antonio Grulli), Museo MAMbo, Bologna, 2011.
Elena Volpato, born in Venice in 1973, she is an art critic and Curator at GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, where in 1999 she initiated Italy’s first public collection of video art. She expanded the museum’s collection of artist’s books starting in 2017 and launched a collection of artist’s records in 2024. She has curated numerous group exhibitions of contemporary art, accompanied by critical publications, mostly within GAM. Among these “Cronostasi. Tempo filmico, tempo fotografico”, 2009, “Tutta la memoria del mondo”, 2010, “Sul principio di contraddizione”, 2021, “Hic sunt dracones”, 2022, and the photography exhibition “Expanded. I Paesaggi dell’arte”, 2024. She curated “HM, HE, HA” in 2024–25 at Fondazione Coppola in Vicenza, dedicated to four contemporary Italian painters. She has curated major solo exhibitions of artists including Ian Kaer, Martha Rosler, Paolo Icaro, Luigi Ontani, Eva Marisaldi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Flavio Favelli, Maria Morganti, Michele Tocca at GAM, and Luca Bertolo at CEAAC in Strasbourg. She collaborated on video art screenings with several international institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Tate Modern in London. She is currently preparing “Dietro l’opera”, an exhibition that brings together Giulio Paolini and Luca Bertolo at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid, March 2025. She was curator from 2017 to 2019 of the exhibitions at FLAT, Fiera Libro Arte Torino, for which she organized the group exhibition “Lettura per voci e silenzio” and monographic shows dedicated to the publications of Ettore Sottsass, Dieter Roth and Maurizio Nannucci, accompanied by critical essays. She has published numerous essays on various themes and artists of contemporary art, as well as monographic studies of several artists. The most recent is dedicated to the conceptual painting of Salvo, published in “Io sono Salvo”, Nero Editions, supported by the Italian Council of the DGCC. She has also written for international publications such as “Carol Rama. Eine Klassik aus dem Bauch der Geschichte” in the monographic catalogue dedicated to the artist by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2024, and “Martha Rosler. As if”, published in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition at The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn, 2019. She has published several articles in the journal “Antinomie” since 2023. From 2011 to 2012 she was art editor for “Saturno”, the cultural weekly supplement of Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Turin, NABA in Milan, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna. She gives lectures on contemporary art topics and oversees the acquisitions of contemporary art at GAM Torino.