BARBARA CAPPONI / BABAS

A Tribute in Three Retablos 

In 2018 Palazzo dei Diamanti, in Ferrara, hosted the exhibition “Courbet and nature.” The MLB, the home gallery of Maria Livia Brunelli, which is on the same street, as always asked one of its artists to draw inspiration, in a contemporary key, from the exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti. I was not the one. It was Silvia Camporesi, who did a beautiful job entitled “Mirabilia. Beauty is in nature.”

However, since I do love the work of the French painter – and I find his gaze on the world extraordinary – I couldn’t resist, and I made three Retablos.

I started with three landscapes and made them three-dimensional; then I let in a little Courbet. I tried, in my own way, to describe the artist’s fascination, enchantment and communion with the universe to which he belongs. I based my project on the works I had seen and on the reproductions I’d found.

But when I entered Palazzo dei Diamanti, I realized I hadn’t understood anything.

Courbet paints landscapes as living things: they are portraits. His animals have a beating heart under the paint. The waves are falling and the mountains are slow waves of the earth.  It is the work of a magician.

Until I saw the works with my own eyes, they’d been impossible to imagine.

The Retablos trilogy was however exhibited at MLB on that occasion, and then at ArtVerona the same year. They are a very small tribute to a great sorcerer, whose spells are so powerful they will last for centuries.