"Bar-Bara Italy &!?" is the multicolor, cheeky, postmodern version of the national identity imagined by Luigi Ontani based on a successful
contemporary mixture of signs and symbols that surprise, recall
and blend the cultures of the East and the West. "Bar-Bara Italy & !?" is the title that Luigi Ontani gives his topogeografic idol, planted in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. And "Barbarous Italy" was the title wanted by Curzio Malaparte for his storytelling
description of the National soul so closely linked to the creative fury of the Baroque period, to the work of the extraordinary men who created an art so "rich in surprises and music, in fear and obsessions, as if shaken and shattered by a tremendous desire to create monstrous combinations...."
In the drama of the seventeenth century, we can measure the decay of
imagination of the classical world in the hypothesis of an all-Italian civilization
("full-blooded and Catholic", as said by Curzio). It will combine continuously different formal solutions, from Michelangelo′s muscular upheaval, the first expressive form of the Baroque, up to the aesthetic changes of the modern age, with the gimmicks and fibrillating visual manipulations of our day and age. In this aesthetic recantation that symbolically summarizes the meaning of a sparkling vitality, Luigi Ontani′s art is also recognized, as if reflected in the mirror on the fanciful map of the peninsula which has reached the 150th anniversary of its conquered national unity. It is depicted as a person, as a self-portrait in progress and as the owner of an ever-green and original "baroque soul" aesthetically capable of facing the change of times.
Duccio Trombadori
The image is courtesy of Maestro Luigi Ontani
