CHIARA BERTOLA THRESHOLDS Maria Morganti in the Castelvecchio

CHIARA BERTOLA THRESHOLDS Maria Morganti in the Castelvecchio Museum. For many years Maria Morganti's art has centred on experimenting with, and searching for, new aspects of colour. Whenever I see one of her exhibition projects I am amazed how, within those rigorously superimposed layers of colour, there is always room for variation, and how that single repetitive gesture can spark of continually unusual and surprising relationships with space and time. I have frequently written about the relationship between Morganti and her painting material; it is a phenomenological, emotive, and experiential as well as linguistic relationship. Maria sees and experiences her colours as though they were living subjects, and she has a genuine dialogue with them. A testimony of this is a diary in which she notes each emotional variation before transforming it into a colour variation. Writing about these notes, I mentioned how colour is formed for her: "I find colour, I do not make it. I do not invent it, I do not plan it, I do not produce it, I do not reproduce it… I reach out to it". It turned out that for her painting was not a mental fact but, rather, a natural phenomenon that continually changed like something organic. "That colour is as it is in that particular moment, but it can become something else. Colour is not a concept… it is a natural phenomenon… it is not a thought but an experience". This dialogue enables her to grasp and express what colour is without imprisoning it or forcing it into preconceived limits. These works "without limits" now vie with the Castelvecchio museum itself and relate, not only to the collections of archaeology and ancient art but, in particular, to the exhibition layout designed by Carlo Scarpa. Her project is a series of installations following Scarpa's arrangement and takes the form of modules that can give a new rhythm to his work. At the edges… Maria Morganti enters the museum through a "side door" and her steps follow a fragmented, subtle, and conceptual path… This is a way for questioning herself about the fragile and difficult problems that arise whenever a contemporary artist exhibits in an ancient museum. What do you add? What relationship are you searching for? And up to what point can a chronological arrangement of pictures on the walls be interesting? Isn't it more stimulating to acrobatically rearrange the hanging or overturn certain temporal and linguistic sequences? In fact this artist's works create short-circuits and, as we shall see, overturn the chronological order simply by being placed at the edges, an unusual position to be taken by an artist in a museum. As Maria wrote to me, "Disseminate. Indicate. Slowly infiltrate the spaces the museum has left free; come closer to the works by listening to them, being immersed in the empty spaces, in the pauses, the interstices, the cracks, behind the works. At the back. At the edges". In the Querini Stampalia museum she replaced the areas above the five doors along the rooms overlooking the canal with five pictures of the same size which she had painted to match the antique ones. In Castelvecchio she has chosen to occupy empty spaces and to wander through the museum in a decentralized, almost hidden manner by infiltrating the interstices of the panels supporting a large 14th century painting, occupying a frame left empty while an fresco is being restored, filling in a piece of a panel that has been lost or precariously placing her work on the floor and leaning it against the wall, so that it virtually becomes a base for the pictures hung above it… These are all exhibition "punctuation marks" leading us to experience her work in the museum as, on the one hand, an "intruder" according to Nancy's definition - i.e. by making an opening through which we can react to something living - and, on the other, as the possible creation of a threshold and a passageway where, for a while, time is suspended. On the Threshold… A canvas by Morganti is placed at the back of a panel by Stefano da Verona, Madonna del roseto (1420). Scarpa placed this panel in the centre of the room with its back turned to visitors as they enter. Now the front/back, before/after, and past/present are queried and suspended by this simple reversal: what was experienced as "behind" now has a "front", brought to life by this "intruder" installed behind the 15th century panel. These two works, joined together in the centre of the room, redefine the whole (symbolic) space and its fruition even with regard to the other works exhibited in it. The two pictures united at the back and linked together in a temporal relationship, in fact, do not show their own surfaces simultaneously, as they would if they were side by side, but in an alternative way: when one is revealed the other is hidden. In this manner they are no longer forced into a competitive comparison with the risk of being limited to a chronological stylistic analysis. I like to think that this has given us a possibility for enjoying a work on its merits alone and that, in the movement of the eye from work one to another, an area has been opened up where relationships and judgments begin to waver. The space created "between" the union of the two works becomes the functional element of a passageway. A threshold, in other words, where something is passed by in order to enter something else, something that permits us to qualify both territories and in this way to pinpoint a genuine differentiation between them through their reciprocal relationship. A threshold, according to Benjamin's definition, "is a zone. To be exact, it is a passageway. The word "threshold" contains within itself the sense of change, of a "passage".1 It is that moment in space in which space itself has no limits and where continuity is realized, before and after division. On a threshold two places do not end but, rather, begin. They are always on the point of their own beginning. Almost like a snapshot, Maria's picture "placed" behind the Madonna del roseto canvas blocks time and space: it is art taking its time over art, the legitimization of its own fragile contemporary word, But what is the meaning of sitting in the shade of the present? Of "occupying" the back of the past by placing the present in an anterior position? What does the artist want to say by inserting herself into a fresco or infiltrating the cracks of a wooden stretcher? We need to listen to what she has to say: "To shift, dislocate, and remove the place that has kept the whole West within the constraints of tradition; by approving and setting a seal on its role as tradition, as is normal, tradition builds walls, it blocks, and encloses".2 This is not a question of a humble gesture in the present which manifests itself in shadows or behind or in front but, rather, of the force of a different way of seeing. By trying to relate to the past in this way, Morganti rehabilitates the knowledge that stands on the threshold, that questions itself about another possible order, in this case one that finds enjoyment of a work in the relationship between past and present. Deep down this is the same question that for years Maria has been asking time through her pictures, through her painting which also is infinite and which, in the rhythm of each layer of colour, continues to search for the passageway towards something different. Morganti prefers to place her works in museums where she can face the challenge of a collection; she favours fragments: for example, what is left of the Madonna panel by the Maestro di Murano (c.1581). In this case the artist has placed a small canvas in the empty space left by the reconstruction of the panel: a fragmentary, faceless Madonna on whose lap the innocent and happy child plays with two cherries… When he constructed the frame for this fragment, Carlo Scarpa left a white space that left to imagination the reconstruction of the whole panel. Maria has inserted herself into this empty space and has completed it by giving it another element for creating a new way of looking at its shattered space. This should not be considered a simple contrivance but as the coming together of two paths of art that meet up on a threshold. A threshold once more: that passageway within which a momentary suspension allows the passage from one dimension to another. Here we find once again the receptiveness of something that, at an individual level, gains meaning by approaching the other; something that leaves behind its incomplete sense in order to open up to a meeting with what is "different" and "distant". This is what Nancy means by the word "deconstruction"; this does not simply mean the substitution of one process with another but, rather, it is "a chance, a chance for thought, the great possibility of which consists, above all, in keeping ourselves free of clichés and previously established figures".3 In fact her picture - a small double monochrome piece - does nothing other than insert itself into a series of cross-references within the history of art: a narration that is suspended and then reactivated each time that someone pinpoints and develops it. The artist then acts as an intruder and sparks off a series of contrasts and differences that, like noises offstage, finally activate relationships that are able to light up and amplify voices and colours.

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