LASCIA CHE TI PORTI DOVE HO PERSO L'INNOCENZA

Site specific mural

2022

Kappa noun

Photo: Carlo Favero

text curated by DAVIDE FERRI AND ANTONGIULIO VERGINE

KappaNoun is pleased to present (Regarding) Human Workshop and Painting, which includes six large works by Mario Schifano that were exhibited in the 1980 exhibition held in Cesena, in the Palazzo del ridotto venue, on the initiative of Emilio Mazzoli and a group of Cesena enthusiasts.

The exhibition will also feature Lascia che ti porti dove ho perso l’innocenza, an intervention by young Bolognese muralist Andrea Marco Corvino - Lol 63 on one of the shed’s exterior walls. The work, made with spray paint but only after a drawing that plans its development, is a story, visionary and heterogeneous, where some figures but also representations of animals, objects and hints of exotic landscapes, meet to form a kind of wunderkammer or a real autobiography in images.

Davide Ferri

If the set of elements that make up the work constitutes, for Andrea Marco Corvino himself, a kind of Wunderkammer, Let me take you where I lost my innocence represents an invitation to explore its intimate and personal dimension.
Not everyone had the privilege of accessing the famous “wonder rooms,” extraordinary places whose beauty was jealously guarded by their owners.

Corvino, in the case of the large mural created on the outside of Kappa-Noün, makes a paradigm shift: he metaphorically opens the doors to anyone who wants to know about his most precious possessions. These are autobiographical treasures, the result of the accumulation of lived or felt experiences, and capable, for this very reason, of being shared even by those who have not experienced them firsthand. The personal journey gives way, then, to a collective crossing, with Corvino himself accompanying us, symbolically, “where he lost his innocence. ”Spray, within this narrative, replaces words, after a preliminary sketch has outlined the basic concepts anyway, and the language appears exotic and essential, to ‘betray’ the childhood spent in South Africa and the studies conducted in graphic design. There is much of both in the work, both in terms of form - dry and linear, using flat backgrounds of color - and in terms of content.

Following the chronological order of the narrative, from left to right, immediately recognizable elements - such as the lion and the palm tree - alternate with symbols taken directly from African culture: the duafe, a symbol of femininity, decorates the vase from which the artist is born, sanctioning the beginning of the story; a little further on, the osidan - belonging, along with the former, to the sphere of the Ghanaian adinkra - symbolizes inspiration and creativity; between the two, the image of a small manilla, a kind of bracelet, widespread especially in West Africa, which, during the period of the slave trade, was used as a bargaining chip - the artist recalls how twelve were needed to be able to buy a prisoner. Corvino’s Wunderkammer - a.k.a. LOL63 - preserves, however, not only evidence of the past: next to the image of a distant family episode, whose dramatic nature is evoked by the tears of the mother-peacock, one finds, in fact, that of a glove, symbol of a passion and discipline, and that, strictly contemporary, of a policeman wearing a mask. Next to the latter, the image of a train, also dredged up from the recent past, seems to lead us to the place indicated by the title-which, as it happens, comes right out of the chimney-while the flag of Senegal represents a tribute to tenacity and courage, embodied, in this case, by a beloved figure recently encountered. Closing the tale is the figure of a woman contemplating a skull, a symbol of the end of something, but also a good luck charm to be treasured for the rest

of the journey.

Let me take you where I lost my innocence is an open book, a set of initially hidden treasures that Corvino - a member of the Rialto18 art collective - decides to unveil and share with the community. After all, it is thanks to the choice of having made the Wunderkammer accessible that the world has been able to understand the beauty it is made of.

Antongiulio Vergine

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