Italo Cremona. All the rest is the depth of night

Mart, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in collaboration with Fondazione Torino Musei and GAM - Turin's Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, dedicates a retrospective exhibition to the work and creative universe of Italo Cremona (Cozzo, 1905 - Turin, 1979) that traces the artist's entire production.

Curated by Giorgina Bertolino, Daniela Ferrari and Elena Volpato, the exhibition will first stop at the GAM in Turin from 24 April to 8 September 2024 and at the Mart in Rovereto from 28 September 2024 to 9 March 2025 for a second show.

The title of the exhibition Tutto il resto è profondo notte (All the rest is the depth of night) refers to the concluding sentence with which Cremona closed one of his texts for the Acetilene column in Roberto Longhi's magazine Paragone. The nocturnal theme is one of the artist's favourite themes, an expressive, existential and philosophical condition that produces dreams, nightmares, apparitions, fantastic images.

A painter-writer, a multifaceted and eccentric intellectual, in his paintings and writings Italo Cremona investigated the Zona ombra, an expression that became the title of one of his books published by Einaudi in 1977: a territory in which darkness comes into contact with light through vivid flashes or glimmers, the glow of an acetylene lamp or the wake of a shooting star, as in the dystopian novel La coda della cometa (The Comet's Tail).

The exhibition at the Mart presents approximately 120 works, including an important nucleus of paintings and a selected collection of drawings, created between 1925 and the first half of the 1970s. The exhibition aims to highlight the most topical and contemporary aspects of Cremona's work and his figure as an irregular intellectual, engaged in numerous creative fields and akin, in his unusual way of impersonating the 20th century, to other eccentric figures in Turin such as Carlo Mollino and Carol Rama.

Specifically, the exhibition is based on the conviction that his pictorial and intellectual teaching has worked over the years, across generations, much more than what has been recognised to date. Cremona's faithfulness to the particular pictorial motif, developed over the decades, of the façades and architecture of Turin, apparently deserted of all human presence, painted in reality as the wings of a secret city theatre, always alluding to a further space, hidden behind the silent façade. Furthermore, space will be given to the more idiosyncratic nature of the extensive production of nudes, highlighting the evidence in which the traditional academic exercise slips towards a visionary production of epiphanies, apparitions of otherness, small hallucinations that no longer distinguish the reality of the model's body from the pictorial segmentation of its details.