Luigi Ontani Le Ore

cm 216 x 136 cad.

The early years of Luigi Ontani’s career, after training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, are marked by several trips to the Far East, where he encountered a culture that would profoundly affect all of his works, including his most mature. When, in 1970, he moved permanently to Rome, Ontani had already been experimenting for two years with his famous photographic tableaux vivants in which the subject is always the artist who uses his body to represent various subjects and themes. "Le Ore" is a work that, whilst being in the wake of this photographic tradition, contains both a performative dimension – each image is the result of a set-up curated by the artist in its smallest detail – and installation, connected to the nature of his original project. In fact, this work was exhibited in 1976 at the Galleria L’Attico in Rome, in an exhibition in which twenty-four photographic poses were projected, “materializing” at the hour of the day corresponding to that in the clock represented in each of the images. The tableaux vivant is the expressive instrument through which Ontani stabilizes his image in a space and time closer to that of painting than of performance. In each of the photographic poses in which the artist reinterprets some of the best-known characters of his production (Narcissus, Leda and the Swan, Dante, St. Sebastian, etc.) we can trace several references to art history, starting with the leitmotif of the astrological clock that marks the hours, a direct citation of the one made by Paolo Uccello for the counter-façade of Santa Maria del Fiore.

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A. Galasso (ed.), OntanElegia, Turin 2004 G. Maraniello (ed.), Gigante3RazzEtà7ArtiCentAuro, exhibition catalogue (Bologna, MAMbo-Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna), Bologna 2009. M. Vecellio (ed.), Luigi Ontani. CoacerVolubilEllittico, exhibition catalogue (Rivoli, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea; Dijon, Le Consortium; Berne, Kunsthalle), Città di Castello 2012. G. Di Pietrantonio (ed.), “Er” Simulàcrum” “Amo”, exhibition catalogue (Bergamo, GAMeC-Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea), Bergamo 2015.

Foto Luigi Ontani

Purchased from Tullia Ontani

Photography