Cataloghi di Vita e paesaggio di Capo d’Orlando

The national exhibition Vita e paesaggio di Capo d’Orlando (Life and landscape of Capo d’Orlando) was born in 1955 in the homonymous city of the Messina province, in Sicily, as an art residency focused on realist painting, with the purpose not only of bringing art in the Tyrrhenian town, but also to let people know the beauty of its landscape. The art residency method, adopted to let the artists make works born from actually living that place, was dropped in the 1963 edition, with the broadening of the invites to a larger quantity of artists as a consequence (from fifteen to over three hundred). Furthermore, in this edition, an art director is chosen for the first time, Albano Rossi from the Sindacato Libero Arti Figurative di Palermo, with support from Donatella Moncada. However, the new arrangements were largely criticized, especially by the artists who stated the need to live the place to be able to capture its essence in painting. In fact, in these years, the exhibition felt stuck in a past dimension, outside of the artistic tendencies that were already spreading in the rest of Italy. A turning point can be found in 1968 with the admission of Vittorio Fagone, Basilio Reale e Giuseppe Sicari in the committee, art critics in contact with Milan and Rome art scenes, opposed however by the rest of the jury, loyal to the traditional ways of the exhibition. Besides, during the opening ceremony of the exhibition, the painter Eduardo Arroyo stated his refusal of the traditional religious blessing of the exhibition during the opening ceremony, the prize assignment mechanisms and the conventional ways of art exhibitions. This event connects Capo d’Orlando to the general environment of protests that were spreading in that year even in the art scene. The next edition, in 1970, opens to the experimental techniques and art research of that period, also dropping the competition among the artists. Landscape becomes the representation of a way of living, a society, no longer a simple landscape view. This vision culminates in 1973 with the signing by the artists, with Vittorio Fagone and Guido Giuffrè, of a document asking for some modifications just before the opening ceremony, which stated the need for real meetings with the people during the artists’ stay in the town. The exhibition continues in an experimental environment also because of Fagone’s guidance, until 1978, when his exclusion from the committee caused an involution. When he returned to the head of the exhibition in 1980, he suggested an exhibition titled Mixed Media – Immagini scritture suoni azioni (Mixed Media – Images writing sound actions), which already shows the intention of leaving the expression to a non-strictly figurative model. The next year, with Fagone as the art director once more, the Universa Ars exhibition reflects on the many sides of contemporary art, leaving its trace in the national art scene. The 80s go on with subject exhibitions after Fagone’s farewell to the committee and until his return in 1987 with the Extra Moenia exhibition, which talked about the crisis of the role of big cities and the new experiences of the smaller towns. Many exhibitions followed, with Fagone’s art direction, like Ricercare la bellezza, Isola, Isole, Nord verso Sud, Sud verso Nord and A capo in 1991, which was almost a full stop in the story of this exhibition series, that tried to go on in the following years, with a very different result from the past decades. The exhibition’s heritage was finally received by the LOC, which focuses on preserving and promoting the collection.

Every edition had some printed materials, like the catalogues which are stored up in the archives at LOC. The ones starting from the tenth edition (1968) are particularly interesting: the first one is a square catalogue which unveiled all the information as it was opened and that resulted in a poster with twenty-seven printed fingerprints which represented every artist of that edition. It was printed by Arti Grafiche Cosentino in Palermo, who might have done the actual design work too, since a graphic designer is never mentioned in the catalogue. The same printing house also worked on the next edition in 1970, which follows the same poster-catalogue formula, and has a typographic composition with the artists’ names in a “wave” shape on the front. In the following years the poster formula was dropped, though remaining loyal to the square shape, in the form of a four-sided foldable booklet, with a typographic identity which stayed coherent until 1974 and was later recovered in 1976. It is not clear who designed nor printed these editions’ catalogues, but they all have a front page with the year and place standing out in a serif font which is also used in the internal pages for the artists’ name list; the prevailing colors are, once again, red and black, used by themselves or alternated, like in the 1970’s catalogue.