Salerno, inauguration of the exhibition Libero De Cunzo and the Island of Arturo

Salerno, inauguration of the exhibition Libero De Cunzo and the Island of Arturo: 50 images tell a journey into the 'secret garden'.

Thursday 7 July at 18:00, at the Pinacoteca Provinciale di Salerno, Palazzo Pinto, the President of the Province, Eng. Michele Strianese, inaugurates the exhibition LIBERO DE CUNZO and the Island of Arturo. Fifty images tell a journey into the 'secret garden'.

Promoted by the Province of Salerno and the Museo-FRaC Baronissi, as part of the events of Procida Capital of Italian Culture 2022, the exhibition is sponsored by the Municipality of Salerno, the Municipality of Baronissi, the European University Center for Cultural Heritage, with partners the Morra Foundation and the EM Arts Association.

Curated by Massimo Bignardi, the exhibition features fifty photographs, taken partly between 2007 and 2008 and published in 2009, with a text by Elisabetta Montaldo, in the volume Procida. The secret garden, part in this spring. They are images dedicated to the enchantment of the gardens that shape the Procida territory, dressing it in colors, from the yellow of the lemons to the range of green that carves out segments of sky and sea. An island framed by the blue of the sea but which, in its belly, hides its typicality as an island of the earth, of the fields, of the farmers.

“Procida – writes President Strianese in the catalogue published by Gutenberg Edizioni – its secret beauties, the gardens that hide the essence of nature in symbiosis with the blue of the sea is the theme of this project dedicated to the photographer Libero De Cunzo, one of the main interpreters of contemporary Italian photography. A sequence of fifty images that today are granted to the gaze of new travellers and that tell of paths designed by ancient architecture, among small vegetable gardens that make the island a 'land' suspended between the rural world and the sea that frames it. It is the island that reminds us of Elsa Morante, Cesare Brandi and many other protagonists of 20th century Italian culture. I am therefore happy to sponsor and host this important cultural event in our Provincial Art Gallery of Salerno, this further journey into contemporaneity, with the desire to also promote the event that today sees Procida as the Capital of Italian Culture”.

“Fifty images – observes Alfonso Andria, President of the European University Centre for Cultural Heritage-Ravello – tell a journey into the secret garden: this is how Libero De Cunzo's lens reads Moranti's Arturo's Island and transfers to the user that idea of ​​culture that cannot remain 'isolated' in a territory, perhaps with the mitigating factor of it being an island, but must express even more a desire to open up to the outside, to involve other realities, to compare and dialogue between cultures, places, cultural landscapes, traditions and that is a 'mix' of material and intangible heritage, at the centre of which the citizen returns as the protagonist! This is the message of the Faro Convention on which we have reflected a lot in Ravello in the last period, developing elaborations and concrete ideas for the declination of the contents also in an operational key. This is also how networks are built, this is also how Culture does not isolate itself!”

“Free De Cunzo – notes Massimo Bignardi, director of the Museo-FRaC and curator of the exhibition – makes photography the interpreter of a way of framing reality, renouncing any confirmation of it; rather, it follows the unfolding of signs of the urban or of the landscape-nature over time. An imaginative methodology that, in this photographic sequence dedicated to Procida, guides us into the mystery of the frames, into the black and white of the orange blossoms or of the 'women in shirts', between lemon groves suspended over the sea and gardens of colours wrapped in the myth of the island. Libero reinterprets his beloved Procida, the 'mother land' as he has always perceived it, restoring to it the identity of 'secret' places. Furthermore, for this exhibition, he wanted to push the sequence, updating the vision of the island, invaded by the cheerful people of the 'cappellini'. Photography adds the time for a new reading to the gaze. It is a reading of the soul that helps us overcome the discouragement in front of the beauty of the landscape and rediscover, in it, the essence of our breath. Libero gives us a memory of a Procida wrapped up in its intimate life and, at the same time, reveals to us the accelerated rhythm of a reality that pervades it today.”

The exhibition will remain open until August 21st, with the following opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 – 19:30.