Un veiled
The Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, in collaboration with the Cy Twombly Foundation, is presenting from Friday May 20 to Saturday June 11, 2022, in its spaces at Via Crispi 18, Un/veiled – Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations: a programme of concerts, video screenings and piped music, which includes the exhibition of a series of works by Cy Twombly (1928-2011).
The prestigious calendar includes the involvement of internationally renowned musicians and artists: Harold Budd (selection of recorded tracks), Eraldo Bernocchi and Nils Petter Molvꬱr, Petulia Mattioli (video projections) (live 20, 21 May 2022), Isabella Summers (27, 28 May 2022), Thierry Balasse (10, 11 June 2022), Devendra Banhart and Sudan Archives (performance documentation).
Single tracks from the repertoires of different musicians or, in some cases, whole albums, have paid tribute to the sensibility of one of the most important artists of the 20th century, showing how creative figures from different disciplines have found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in Cy Twombly’s production. Out of this has come a rich and surprising archive that brings together the works of fourteen exponents of different genres of music, from jazz to classical music, passing through more experimental electronic works.
On this particular occasion, the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio will also present a small but exquisite selection of Cy Twombly’s works on paper from the early 1970s, including the two Studies for Treatise on the Veil, from the series of drawings and collages he made in the wake of the impressions aroused in him by listening to Pierre Henry’s piece La Voile d’Orphée; two works on paper in which signs, lines and numerals run across the surface, as if to suggest the idea of the scores typical of post-war avant-garde music.
THE SPACE BETWEEN
The calendar of Un/veiled opens, on Saturday 21 May, with Eraldo Bernocchi, composer of Like a Fire that Consumes All before It (2018), soundtrack of the documentary film Cy Dear (Andrea Bettinetti, Italy, 2018) devoted to the life of Cy Twombly, performing an adaptation of his work, accompanied by the trumpet of the Norwegian jazz musician Nils Petter Molvær.
As an exceptional setting for the performance, Petulia Mattioli’s video installations in real time, Hyperreality and Feeling Excluded and In Praise of Chiaroscuros and Suspended Time: A perceptual flow to meet ourselves amidst shadow, light and darkness.
TO NEPTUNE, RULER OF THE SEAS PROFOUND
The second evening on the programme, on Saturday 28 May, is devoted to Isabella Summers, who will present the Italian première of To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound (2019), a musical composition and sound experience dedicated to Cy Twombly’s work, already presented in 2019 at Gagosian in London, curated by Tatiana Cheneviere.
Following the artist’s life chronologically and taking inspiration from his most celebrated works, Isabella Summers reinterprets Twombly’s language, translating its signs and inscriptions into music and making use of the same quotations, drawn from poems and literary texts, as can be found in the great artist’s production.
CONCERTS PIERRE HENRY
The last date on the calendar, that of Un/veiled on Saturday 11 June, proposes instead a concert by Thierry Balasse who will perform two pieces by the composer Pierre Henry: La Voile d’Orphée (1953) and Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950).
Cy Twombly loved music and, as Nicola Del Roscio wrote in the introduction to Cy Twombly. Drawings. Cat. Rais. Vol. 5, 1970-1971, was struck by Pierre Henry’s composition when he heard it on the radio in 1953. The piece opens with a recording of the manipulated sound of a piece of cloth being ripped that serves to symbolise the dramatic death of Orpheus, torn to pieces by the Bacchantes. That initial sound, which seems to expand endlessly, would later provide the inspiration for Twombly’s paintings Treatise on the Veil (1968) and Treatise on the Veil [Second Version], 1970.
