Realismo Magico. Uno stile italiano

The definition Magical Realism concerns a moment of Italian art circumscribed, in its most creative and original phase, in about fifteen years, between 1920 and 1935, representing in essence the climate of the return to the craft of painting and a specific declination of a “neoclassical” temperament, which has tangents with the déco taste in its Italian specificity, but also of a refined “fifteenth-century archaism” and ambiguous metaphysical/realistic atmospheres.

At the same time specific terms such as realism, magic, metaphysical, spectral, objective, true, natural, surreal are attached to this segment of Italian art.

On display are Felice Casorati‘s highly original works, such as the Portrait of Silvana Cenni of 1922, as well as Giorgio de Chirico ‘s early metaphysical inventions such as The Self-Portrait e Octobrata of 1924, but also the proposals of Carlo Carrà, with The Daughters of Loth of 1919, and Gino Severini with his Card Players; all proposed an original and all-Italian “return to order.”

Curated by Gabriella Belli and Valerio Terraroli, the exhibition project aims-according to a precise philological and historiographical reconstruction of the Magical Realism phenomenon-to introduce visitors to more than eighty masterpieces of this complex and fascinating artistic current, with a layout curated by Studio Mario Bellini with Raffaele Cipolletta.

A new look at the Movement, a new key to interpretation that, thirty years after the last Milanese exhibition on the subject curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco in 1986, Palazzo Reale is once again offering the public a unique opportunity to take stock of a historical-artistic period-the interwar period-that has long suffered a damnatio memoriae, but which in recent years has first been the subject of a gradual rediscovery through monographic lunges on individual artists that have managed to keep its interest alive, and now the object of a real trend of valorization that culminates, after thirty years of uninterrupted study, in this choral exhibition on Magic Realism.