Fantarca

B&B Fine Art Gallery in Lugano presents Fantarca, a group exhibition inspired by the novel of the same name by Giuseppe Berto. When the author published this short book in 1965, the world was immersed in the Cold War between the United States and Russia, an ideological division that began after the Second World War and set the two nations and their allies against each other. From this sharp divide, combined with his youthful experiences as a soldier, the idea for the novel emerged: a future in which the Earth is split in half between followers of the Square and the Triangle, and in which those who are “different” are forced to emigrate to Saturn. The two geometric shapes represent, in a simple but effective way, the various ideological divisions of human history. Even after more than sixty years, the story remains relevant, because these oppositions have not decreased but multiplied: United States–Russia, United States–China, Russia–Ukraine, Israel–Palestine, and many others. As in the novel, today’s conflicts also exacerbate issues such as the environment and immigration.

The Fantarca exhibition aims to symbolically overcome these divisions through the power of abstraction. Each invited artist uses abstract painting as a personal stylistic language. Paola Alborghetti introduces essential traces and minimal figurative elements, with an almost bodily mark that becomes an emotional testimony of life and travel experiences. Domenico Asmone builds dynamic compositions through vigorous gestures and layers of dense colour. Philippe Chitarrini works with precise fields of colour, calibrated chromatic combinations, and rhythms that evoke system, order, and modulation. Chuck Drake brings materials and process to the foreground, creating complex forms through accumulation, subtraction, and rhythmic variations. Martin Lechner, through material stratifications and abrasions, suggests surfaces in continuous transformation, like visual sedimentations. Michele Lombardelli reduces the painting to a minimal grammar of structures, series, and repetitions, highlighting the connection between form and system. Albano Morandi, with his geometric weavings, proposes an unstable balance between order and vibration.

To emphasise the reference to the novel, only square-format works are presented in the exhibition, each accompanied by a print of the same painting digitally cropped into a triangle. The square thus becomes a shared language, while the triangular “translation” introduces a difference that allows each poetics to be viewed from a new perspective, showing that even when the form changes, the strength of the artwork’s message remains unchanged.

Closing the exhibition is the projection of a musical work produced in 1966 by RAI and directed by Vittorio Cottafavi: the black-and-white images of the adventures of Don Ciccio, captain of the Fantarca, interact with the colours of the painted surfaces on display, adding yet another layer to the divisions and connections explored by the exhibition.

All the elements on view highlight how divisions are often merely formal, and how they could be overcome with a simple shift in perspective, avoiding the fate of travelling through the future in a shabby second-hand spaceship, just like in Giuseppe Berto’s tale.

Curated by Samuele Menin