Renaissances, Un hommage contemporain à Florence: Hotel de la Salle, Paris

Florence, today silent and somewhat hieratic witness of its glorious artistic past, was by the mid-14th century the central cultural battleground between Medieval theology-inspired art and philosophy and the man-centered political and artistic revolution of the Renaissance.

  

On behalf of the Etrillard Foundation, Anna Morettini has conceived an exhibition which intends to detect Renaissance Florentine artistic codes and baselines in contemporary art production and by so doing better to understand how breakthroughs and ruptures can transform themselves after centuries into artistic references and traditions.

  

In other words, the intent is to trace the path by which today's artists continue to look backwards devoid of nostalgia but with an incisive and somewhat ironic quest for Florentine and European tradition and its pendulum-like procession of hopes and despairs in humanist values.

 

The exhibition attempts to recreate an inspired dialogue between those contemporary artists who invest in or echo Florentine philosophical background, techniques and materials as used by its renaissance Masters with the assumed goal of looking at man as both Creature and Creator.

 

The first part of the exhibition is centered on the city of Florence itself, its figures and architecture from a photographic standpoint. All contemporary photographic techniques are used to capture the real essence and nature of this eternal City-Museum.

  

The second part revisits tradition and praxis, a focus put on Renaissance techniques as used in contemporary art with respect and distance in such a manner that time or chronology fade away leaving us without historical certainty.

 

Mixing tradition and immediate creation or perception gives its impetus to this exhibition which will be shown in Paris and successively in Florence.