Ibridoli etruschi

Luigi Ontani is considered to be one of the most influential contemporary Italian artists, devoted to experimentation with many different media and tecniques: from photography to sculpture using a wide range of materials, from painting to performance art, with his celebrated tableaux vivants. The common thread of his practice is the unconventional, ironic character of his works, marked by mythopoeic echoes of Western and Eastern iconographic traditions. This publication is devoted to Ontani's site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum. Entrusted to his citationist and playful inspiration, the room with cyclamen-colored walls is decorated with a pictorial cycle of six "ibridoli etruschi" as Ontani himself calls them, for their journey towards fullness of form consists exactly in a process of multiple hybridizations: the attributes and the symbols of divinity as elements of a play of combinations that is the very life of that which is infinite, its visual pulse, the rhythm of its heart. By practicing active imagination, Ontani produces forms that appear to have been generated by an ancestral and impersonal memory, capable of drawing on the mystical level of experience in which the object of the memory consists in what is still to happen – as if their mind travelled in a sort of imminent past. Through the visionary tale of Emanuele Trevi - who together with Ontani undertook a physical and imaginative journey in the footsteps of the Etruscans - the creative process and its ingredients are retraced, the relationship with the models, the 'ars combinatoria and the polymorphic link with countless artistic traditions.