Word: ontani
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Dates: during 1982-1982
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...Perspective" is the latest in the Guggenheim's discursive series of "sample shows" of the current art of different nations. It covers the work of seven artists: three painters (Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nino Longobardi), two sculptors (Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio) and two conceptual/per formance artists (Luigi Ontani and Vettor Pisani). Most of these men are in their 30s, and Pisani, the oldest...
Waldman-a writer prone to detect the Eleusinian mysteries at the bottom of every rabbit hole-interprets as a recovery of myth. All the work is extremely knowing. Its images, from Pisani's impenetrably hermetic Rosicrucian allegories to Ontani's pale face photographed as Dante Alighieri, in red hood and laurel wreath, all hang suspended in double or even triple sets of quotation marks. One can have quite a lot of pick-the-reference fun in this show without getting much in the way of aesthetic thrills...
...recent earthquakes in Naples, are too wispy and facile to convey more than a veiled pathos, except for one large painting of a skew-eyed lion interrupted in his mauling of a woman by a fountain toppling behind him. Altogether too much of the exhibition is pulpy with triviality. Ontani, who dresses in historical costume or mythological nudity and has himself photographed (not only as Dante, but as Christopher Columbus, Don Giovanni and even Leda), is a natural clown. But as a painter he is fatuous, and his watercolors, full of Donald Ducks and magic mushrooms, would have looked dumb...
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