Promoted by the Municipality of Grizzana Morandi and the Union of Municipalities of the Bologna Apennines, the exhibition Luigi Ontani encounters Giorgio Morandi. CasaMondo pursues the activity of environmental valorisation and promotion of contemporary art developed at the Casa-Studio “Giorgio Morandi” and the Fienili del Campiaro.

After the exhibitions Il Paesaggio Necessario (2012, with works by 12 artists including M.Bottarelli, B. Benuzzi, M. Pulini, D. Manto, L. Baldassari, G. Pompili ), Un’Etica per la Natura (2013, with works by D. Monteleone, S. Zagni, E. Laraia, K. Andersen. E. Frani), and the program of events for the 50th anniversary of Giorgio Morandi's death (2014) including the exhibition Galliani incontra Morandi (with works by Omar Galliani), as well as the first photography book published by the Casa-Studio (Casa Morandi, by Luciano Leonotti), it is now the turn of Luigi Ontani and his magic ceramics called nature extramorte antropomorfe [anthropomorphic extra-still lives]. Paradoxically, Morandi's still lives become three-dimensional once again under the constant materialization of Ontani's totemic face, in a process that propels them through space and time with different meanings, and highlights the religious preservation of the osmosis between dream and reality sublimely achieved by Morandi's work.

Specifically created for the rooms in Morandi' house, the nature extramorte antropomorfe (a name that evokes Carroll, Joyce, Savinio, Palazzeschi, …) become part of the fabric of things, colors, light, in the sentimental path through the rooms, and the life, of Giorgio, Anna, Dina, Maria Teresa Morandi.

This “encounter” between Ontani and Morandi obviously highlights both differences and affinities. For example, how the two Artists scan a place or a particularly meaningful spot to find the core of a unique and unrepeatable genius loci (the rural and rugged world of Grizzana with its light and colors, its fields and stone buildings, for Morandi; the bizarre and fascinating, exotic and exoteric architecture of Rocchetta Mattei, sparkling with ceramics and symbols, for Ontani).

Along with Morandi's house, the Fienili del Campiaro (the barns often portrayed by Morandi in his paintings) form a uniquely interesting exhibition complex. In the two barns, more works by and about Ontani will be also displayed ‒ some mythical busts and other ceramics created for this occasion in the main barn, and the video Massimiliano Galliani shot in Romamor about Ontani in the other barn. Built at the same time as the Rocchetta by count Mattei to accommodate the famous patients he treated with electro-homeopathy, a therapy still commonly used in Indian medicine, Romamor is the little villa where the Artist lives for part of the year with his sister Tullia.

Romamor is a fairy tale Artist's house. Its furniture, Murano chandeliers, ceramic works on the walls, stained glass windows, and the studio surrounded by a vast garden create a wonderful and unique Zen environment presented as a very serious game. A sequence of admirable "coincidences" comes to life in this place, starting with the name of the villa itself, a perfect match for an Artist who has chosen Rome as his residence and ideal city (the house where Ontani lives and works was once Antonio Canova's studio) between his frequent trips to India and Bali. The exhibition Luigi Ontani encounters Giorgio Morandi, CasaMondo reveals multiple and complex connections and meanings that flow from Giorgio Morandi's House Studio, where the family's objects are displayed along with Ontani's extra-still lives from June to September 2015, into Romamor, an offshoot of the culture of Rocchetta Mattei and now a fragment of genius loci that has become once more dream, imagination, art of wonder.

Excerpts from Eleonora Frattarolo's text

Luigi Ontani, a gold maned lion

Luigi Ontani is a gold maned lion, in Buddhism a symbol for a man who stores and wastes nothing. Ontani brings his ceramic anthropomorphic extra-still lives into the House of Giorgio Morandi, the birthplace of a painting he recognizes as "sublime". Ontani's works are inspired by objects and still lives depicted by Morandi now returned to their three-dimensionality and decorated by a host of multiple variants and decorative-meaningful inventions expressed by Ontani's own nose, mouth, eyes that transport them through space and time.

Ontani's expressionless, imperturbable, metaphysical face crosses the threshold of the world of phenomena and things. Here, it emerges in the plastic surface of Morandi's objects and marks them with its own memory (…) In this process, it redefines them as places, the layers of which activate the act of memory, of recalling (with the mind, heart, body), because any place is also a time. As such, it acts as a cultural mark and influence on the human eye and fills it with optical, emotional, physical clues. The objects inspired by Morandi's paintings disseminated in this exhibition are marked, controlled by the unified vision of a collector and art lover who explores them as places, and identifies them as a chronology that slides through the world and his own experience. The places of Morandi's sublime art become for Ontani his own detailed and nourishing places. They build a believable, dynamic and articulate symbolism of the unconscious. They transcend their ceramic substance to float in the air of primary ideas like play cards in a ceaseless whirl (…)

With the timeless, fixed, expressionless look seen in all of his previous works, Ontani's face becomes a stamp and the core of the visions, the signature of the images that animates them. They are all around him, and are projected out of him. Yet, they are not physically etched in him. They are not indented in furrows, hidden in crinkles, stretched in tensions. The same face that has seen and loved them, now catalogues them with what is a mere operational awareness. Adding nothing of himself, he opts instead for a lack of expression that becomes the signature of an objective lived experience, an individual piece of human world in the collective things of the human world. Ontani seems to say: "I give you the things I saw just as I remember them, no conceptual or emotional strings attached. They are represented by an aesthetic code that is my own, seemingly alien to you, they are a Zen perceptive experience”.

In other works, Ontani's objects form a descriptive, subjective topography of places of the mind as well as of the sites they have been translated from. They scan a chronology of life only recognizable by the author and unreadable by anyone else. This is not the case here. The precious objects, the mementos from Morandi's work reveal a deep love for recurring experience, for the objects that give it substance and representation, and for the senses that explore it. For example, the Ovomaltine cans and the big water jug, clearly stained with color, declare their genealogy as part of Morandi's "sublime" art, alongside a fragment of life represented by the small mushrooms Morandi loved so much, and that he used to harvest in the woods around Grizzana (…) Ontani arranges his visually pleasing topography by offering views that soothe, although the rational Western culture behind his vision actually hides a powerful residue of irrational myths of death, sacrifice, fertility, that survive defused by play and ironic and symbolic subtractions. The very fact that Ontani's three-dimensional works feature his head, his empty-eyed face, implies a subject-object, nature-culture relationship of observation between his image and the image of the things around him. His portrait, disseminated everywhere, is a stamp of classification of what is known and seen. It is a geographical, chronological, museographical device that measures its distance from the world and also its being in it. Ontani knows he is not the image of his face, but he also knows that his effigy is very much him, it shows his Buddhist self. In his book about Japanese culture, Focillon writes that style is more than mere elegance. It is a higher sense of order, the plastic expression of inner nobility, the regular rhythm of a powerful and serious life. The dynamic structure of Oriental art that suggests rather than fixing the forms of life is made of space, substance, spirit, time. As a supremely elegant man, with his style Ontani rediscovers them. First he looks with his mind, then with his eyes and finally with his body.

A Zen maxim says: “If you want to see, see right at once. When you begin to think, you miss the point”. This is what Ontani's optically bewildering works, although connected to an existing artifact that is the result of the history of images, seem to tell us with their immediate, unmediated approach. It is an Oriental lesson, but it is also a child's reaction to an adult's survey or a body reflex compared to mind laboring. It is also a game, an unconscious movement that triggers the feeling of going back to a child state. Ritual consecration and playful recreation are the two main themes of Ontani's figurative research. They are like tension and relaxation, opening and closing, expansion and contraction, the concentration and distraction of the Buddhist heartbeat. The principle of opposition of man and world that underlies the Western furious approach to life disappears, dissolved in the flow of intuition and instinct that surges from the unconscious. Now the world is a projection of the self, of ourselves.