Last days to see Depero under the skin in Madrid (thanks to the Juan March Foundation)

Conceived to introduce Fortunato Depero’s creative brilliance to the Spanish audience, the exhibition the Juan March Foundation in Madrid is currently dedicating to this innovative Italian artist and designer (Depero Futurista 1913-1950, until 18 January) succeeds where many other exhibitions have failed. It mixes representativeness and scientific rigor with a joyful, genuinely futuristic set up that aligns some of Depero’s masterpieces as if they were brand new art pieces, presented to the public for the very first time. Among them there are some fundamental early works like “I miei balli plastici”, “Io e mia moglie”, “Flora e fauna magica” – all of them belonged to the collection of Gianni Mattioli -, as well as the famous “psychological” portraits of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the aviator Fedele Dinamo Azari.

 

The exhibition takes as a guideline the famous bolted volume “Dinamo Azari”, developed by Depero as a kind of unconventional business card for his staying in New York between 1928 and 1930. This sort of autobiography, which mixes images and slogans, is here disjointed page by page to lead the visitor through the different phases of the artist’s career. At the same time, it outlines the basis of his art practice: it was repetitive, combinatory, multi-material (from painting to tapestry), involved with assemblage, with word and poetry, with graphics and advertising, with performance and theater, with toys; it was vital, playful, cheerful, versatile and self-advertising. Neither an artist easy to frame within the canons of art history, nor a painter or sculptor according to the definitions of his era, perhaps a potential art-director, Depero turns out to be the essence of Futurism.

 

As demonstrated by a broad campaign of scientific exams recently carried out on dozens of his paintings, watercolors, and drawings from the 1920s and 1930s, Depero had a unique, non academic approach to the canvas. His pictures were composed with a sophisticated geometric construction based on his personal interpretation of de-composition of forms and plans typical of Futurism at that time. He liked quite poor canvas, often assembled by himself, or by his wife, generally left unprepared and sometimes even re-used.

 

Depero loved to draw with black China ink. As the infrared proved, changes and simplifications can be spotted in many of his paintings and drawings. Sometimes they document restorations made by the painter himself years after the artworks had been executed, possibly in occasion of late selling of his initially undervalued paintings.

November 25, 2020