In Rende a weekend dedicated to art with three contemporary exhibitions

It makes a city of art: three exhibitions will be inaugurated next weekend.

It starts on Friday 16 December at 5.30 pm at the Civic Museum with “I’ll tell you about Cosenza Comics and Games”, a photographic exhibition dedicated to the first eight historic editions of Cosenza Comics.

A journey through the most iconic shots taken by photographers who have immortalized the places and highlights of your favorite comics and pop culture festival since 2015. Among the photographers on display: Federico Treggiari, Donatella Giordano, Deborah Naccarato, Luciano Brogno, Paolo Ascioti, Salvatore Lio, Maria Crobu and Alessandro Antonio Bianco.

The staging is curated by Roberto Sottile and Sante Mazzei.

The exhibition will remain open until 14 January 2023 and will be accessible to all, with no entrance fee.

Two exhibitions, then, will open on Saturday 17 December at 17.00 at the Museum of the Present.

Davide Barzaghi, with “Olympus Has Fallen” represents an important synergy and collaboration between the municipal administration of Rende and the Nozzoli Art Gallery of Empoli for a photographic project by an artist who has already collected important awards in just a few years.

Eighty-five of his photographic works have been published by the most important and qualified magazines in the sector, twenty-seven awarded in international competitions and important galleries and museums in London, New York, Berlin, Stockholm and Empoli have hosted personal exhibitions of the artist.

The exhibition takes its name from the series of photographs created by Davide Barzaghi, “becomes – as Sottile writes in the text of the catalog – the path to take to reach Mount Olympus, animated by divinities who take shape through a humanity that lives in a dimension full of of symbolism, but deeply contemporary. The mythology that David gives us back with the lens of him is aware of his ethical and moral beauty, and he comes to terms with this beauty. They are scenes that are consumed, personifications that come to life through the gaze of the artist who invites us to observe and contemplate each photographic work from a privileged point of view. “Olympus Has Fallen” is an open window on a pagan world, but rich in spirituality, which is given back to us through a humanity that dwells in its nakedness.”

An intense and refined photographic exhibition, which will remain open to the public in the programming of the Museum of the Present until next January 14, 2023 with free admission.

Also on 17 December at the Museo del Presente an international event with the exhibition of the artist Virginio Vona “between sign and comics” again curated by Roberto Sottile, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

The project of the Museum of the Present was born from the synergy between the municipal administration of Rende and the Centro Studi d’arte Archivio Vinicio Berti, based in Bologna directed by Giuseppe Chiarello of which Sottile himself is the Artistic Director.

Born in 1969 in Rome, Virginio Vona published his first cartoons in the 1980s. After studying advertising graphics at the Federico Cesi school and comics at the International School of Comics in Rome, and at the San Giacomo Art Institute, with the Fenix ​​publishing house he created three volumes of the comic strip Demon Story. In the early 2000s he moved to France where he currently lives and works. His works are exhibited in the prestigious comics collection of the Musée De le Center National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image of Angoulême and are listed at Artquid, Drouot Cotation and the Auction House Cornette De Sait Cyr. The artist, a member of Artprice, currently collaborates with the most renowned galleries in Paris and Brussels such as Huberty and Breyne, Marc By H&B and ArtManiak and with the Artcurial auction house in Paris. Considered, as Alda Teodorani writes, “one of the most multifaceted and innovative artists of comics”, the exhibition at the Museo del Presente retraces, as the art critic Roberto Sottile writes, through a selection of his latest works, the relationship between the pictorial sign and comic strip. His research is centered on the relationship between the environment and contemporary society, where urban architecture becomes the space of action where Vona performs his actions-visions. Painter, draftsman, cartoonist, graphic designer and illustrator, the languages ​​of Virginio Vona merge in a unique path capable of generating a single visual matrix created through the use of acrylics, oils, pencils, pastels and charcoal. Virginio’s works tell us about futuristic cities, about Superheroes who come from everyday life and live in a chaotic space where a rebel sign shatters on the surface becoming the stage for a new comic world. Artistically raised by the inspiration of comics of various genres such as Andrea Pazienza, Tanino Liberatore with Tamburini, Crepax, Manara, Giménez, Hugo Pratt, the exhibition of the Museum of the Present will also offer a section dedicated to the encounter between Vona’s research with that by Vinicio Berti among the founders of Italian Classical Abstractionism, to which Vona looks with particular attention and interest.

The exhibition will remain open to the public until 14 January 2023. Hours: from 9/13 and 16/20 from Tuesday to Saturday.