Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio presents on Wednesday 10 April 2024, at 6.30 p.m.,a meeting open to the public with artist Francesco Arena, the protagonist of the exhibition ‘Francesco Arena. Il fulmine governa ogni cosa”, curators Carlotta Spinelli and Davide Pellicciari, and the participation of art critic and independent curator Teresa Macrì, on the occasion of the launch of the publication dedicated to the exhibition project, published by Lenz Press.

The exhibition ‘Il fulmine governna ogni cosa’, which ended on 7 December 2023 at the Fondazione Del Roscio, as part of the #ProjectRoom format, #ProjectRoomoffered visitors an overlapping pathway of some of the key figures that Francesco Arena has intercepted over time in multiple contexts: from Martin Heidegger to Glenn Gould, from Jacques-Louis David to Cy Twombly, from Paul Engelmann to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ranging from philosophy to music to the visual arts in its many facets, the exhibition project looked at a gallery of personalities spanning the entire world of knowledge.

Through his multidisciplinary practice, Arena makes continuous and subtle references to contemporary society, highlighting the impossibility of being totally self-sufficient and the importance of being able to rely on support from others. Art, just like religion, magic, philosophy and politics, is a support for human life, but also an antidote that man has invented to give meaning to his existence in order to protect himself from the unknown. The works presented referred to the idea of support, aid, both physical and emotional, to which all mankind resorts. The supports that man relies on every day, in the idea proposed by the exhibition project, are the stage of existence. Each sign within the composition could be traced back to a symbolic meaning linked to the human story.

The volume, thus conceived, is configured as a collection of artistic and non-art materials, photographic suggestions and various sources gathered by Arena during the realisation phase of the project, followed by a conversation between the artist and the curators of the exhibition with interventions by Federico Vercellone and Nicola Del Roscio.

The publication will also be presented as part of the Miart 2024 programme, in the #miartalks section, entitled ‘Museums and Other Institutions’. The presentation will be held on Sunday 14 April, at 10.30 a.m., at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery Milan, Piazza Cordusio 3.

During the presentation, there will be a screening of the video made by Santiago Torresagasti Francesco Arena: Der Blitz Steuert Alles, in which the author juxtaposes images made in Todtnauberg, in the Black Forest where Heidegger’s original Hütte is located, with images of the installation made by Francesco Arena for the exhibition at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.

Lenz Press, founded in 2020 by Edoardo Bonaspetti and Stefano Cernuschi, is a publishing house specialising in books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design, including catalogues, monographs, theoretical literature and artists’ books.