garage BENTIVOGLIO

Like God the Father on a peak, in the sky of a Bellini altarpiece, the Ceiling Cat by Eva & Franco Mattes stands out from the false ceiling and protrudes into the BENTIVOGLIO garage. Under him there is no sacred scene, no Crucifixion, no Baptism, no Miracle. The entire exhibition space is completely free, and the cat, like us, faces the void. Rather than showing a new work or a new exhibition, the work chosen for ARTE FIERA 2025 is a ploy to talk about the container itself. \n The privileged position allows the cat to have a look that none of us will ever have; it enters the space of the work powerfully, it can see it (if there were) in its three-dimensionality denied to us by the window, which irretrievably projects everything on the same pictorial plane. In the BENTIVOGLIO garage, in fact, the depth at the bottom does not exist and everything is seen from a single front point of view. The works live under a fixed light, which allows them to create the same immovable shadow, and are immersed between white walls, in a white cube that knows no time, does not age, does not ruin. Winckelmann and the modernists, promoters of unreal candor, would elevate this absolute space to a temple. However, the cat continues to observe us and leads us to wonder why he chose to look out right there, in an infinite game of glances between us, him and the “full power of the void”. \n And if, as happened to Neo, the cat is a huge déjà vu, because it seemed to us that we had already seen it, it's because Eva & Franco Mattes remind us that to make art, man has always copied what had already been done previously by others. The work is always part of a shared language, especially for those who, like them, have always used the network and the digital as territories of investigation and research, where everything is born and develops around communities. And as in any community, meanings are taken to their extreme consequences; with a simple sequence, CTRL + C/CTRL + V, everyone is able to take possession of a meaning and elevate it to their own. Authoriality and creativity thus finally lose their aura. And the irremediable copying errors, the corrupt mistakes of the amanuenses, will perhaps become the new places of imaginative experience.