Memento. I gessi storici dell’Accademia di Brera

Marcello Grassi’s work is a reflection on the memory of simulacra whose value is now lost.

“Suppellettile d’istruzione,” as they are called in the inventories, the casts played a primary role in the training of artists at the Brera Academy, the pivot of a system that laid its foundation in the comparison with the models of classical and Renaissance antiquity.

Memento, the title suggested by Marcello Grassi for this work, part of a larger project on European gypsotheques, is a reflection on the memory of these works whose value is lost, and it is meant to be at the same time a personal tribute of the author to the photographer Herbert List. The choice of subjects has privileged not only the most monumental, accessible or prestigious pieces, but also the casts still present in the halls and especially in the belly of the palace, in that “mortuary underground” or “tenebrous labyrinth” where, more than elsewhere, historical plaster casts reveal their precariousness.

A form of safeguarding, before the next conservation work by the Academy’s Restoration School restores the integrity of each piece, can also express itself in the recovery of that image of painful fragility that time has molded on these icons with illustrious history. The result is surprising. In more than one shot the viewer perceives the statue as living, thanks to a kind of Pygmalion effect, through which the hard material becomes flesh. A flesh so alive that it bears on itself the marks of time: wounds, scars, amputations.

Statues appear in the most unexpected places, where contingencies have taken them. There is in these images, unlike others taken in museums, something profoundly human; something that renders art to the facts of life, placing it out of context, out of the white cubes and the stuffy, aseptic arrangements of the most advanced exhibition spaces. These are images that look at art in life, taking it back to where it arose, to the undifferentiated of existence, to the places of making, of the hand that creates and abandons, among the lights and shadows of appearing and fading. Classrooms, warehouses, storerooms, and basements that make up that labyrinth of knowledge and stories that the Brera Palace has carried within it for hundreds of years.