The exhibition compares the work of two artists, Arduino Cantàfora a
nd Delfino Sisto Legnani. The first, with a series of paintings, drawings and engravings ranging from 1975 to 2020; the second, with a group of photographs created for the occasion (2023, with Alessandro Mensi) as comment and reflection on the work of the older master.
Sisto Legnani, of a younger generation, and Cantàfora share the same training as an architect at the Milan Polytechnic. They both chose to use their academic training to do something other than building: Cantàfora focused on painted and possibly only imagined architecture, Sisto Legnani on a photographic quest for existing buildings.
In 1973 Cantàfora painted La città analoga, a huge 200 x 700 cm canvas for the Architecture Section of the Milan Triennial XV Architettura-Città organized by Aldo Rossi. For Cantàfora, who graduated in Architecture only two years earlier, this is a key work that marks a professional and artistic turning point. He later exhibited at the Milan Triennials in 1981, 1985, 1988, at the Venice Biennials in 1978, 1980, 1984; in 2006 the Musée National d’Art Moderne of the Centre Pompidou acquired about eighty of his works for the permanent collection.
For this project at the Consadori Gallery, Delfino offers his interpretation of Arduino’s work, taking it elsewhere. He considered Cantàfora’s meditation on the city, the loss of reality, their metaphysical sphere ending up at a table contruction of micro still life with impossible, inexistent, evocative objects made of elementary shapes and sharp shadows.
Both Cantàfora’s metaphysical cities and Sisto Legnani’s surreal compositions are but post-apocalyptic allegories where silence, absence and voids possess space or turn it into a dream.
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