The current temporary exhibition at Collezione Maramotti is in collaboration with Turin’s Museo Casa Mollino and has been organised on the occasion of this years Fotografia Europea. The festival’s theme “Fantasies: Narratives, Rules, Inventions” formed the starting point for the Maramotti exhibition titled “Mollino/Insides”. The hang presents a fantastical narrative that brings together works by Enoc Perez, Brigitte Schindler and Carlo Mollino.

Fotografia Europea is an international cultural festival dedicated to contemporary photography. The festival, created in 2006, is promoted by the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, where Collezione Maramotti resides. Mollino/Insides begins with glimpses of Carlo Mollino’s last, mysterious residence at Via Napione, Turin (now a museum) as transformed by Enoc Perez’s brush and Enoc Schindler’s lens, and concludes with Mollino’s own photographs of models, which blur into the enigmatic essence of the imaginary they inhabit.

Since the late 1990s, NYC-based Puerto Rican artist Enoc Perez has been investigating iconic buildings of the twentieth century and the role they have taken on in the popular imagination, as social metaphors of fascination and beauty. At the same time, what seems to float up out of his paint is the ghostly substance of images: symbols that time has transfigured and transported into a vaguer, even dream-like dimension. Collezione Maramotti holds already several works by the artist, including a diptych of Casa Malaparte made for a temporary exhibition in 2008, which is now on permanent display in the former Max Mara factory location.

In September 2019, Perez visited Casa Museo Mollino and took pictures of its interiors, using them as the basis for several new large-scale paintings made specifically for Mollino/Insides.

The same flat has served as inspiration for Brigitte Schindler, whose photographic adventure of the past three years has yielded evocative images and startling visions of its interiors, full of significant details. Schindler’s photographs – exhibited at Collezione Maramotti for the first time – capture the suspended mystery of those spaces and the subtle connections between the objects that Mollino carefully chose and arranged. Through a sophisticated balance of mirrors, reflections, metamorphoses and revelations, her visions lead the careful observer along an aesthetic and conceptual path to discover the complex world of Carlo Mollino– a multifaceted twentieth-century figure famous for his work in architecture, photography, design and more.

Truth be told, Mollino’s last flat on Via Napione, was never really lived in, nor was it really used as a setting for his own photographs… It was rather a private realm, conceived and designed down to the last detail to reflect his vision of the world. Travelling an eclectic path on which content always preceded form and form was never predictable, and moving from the darkroom of photography to the dark rooms – the hidden, secret spaces – of his dwellings (especially the last), Mollino worked with the substance of this “necessary parenthesis” called life, exploring the beauty of nature (including human nature) to explore the deeper meaning of existence in our time and extend it into the hereafter.

In addition to the artwork’s subject of Mollino and his sophisticated, complex imaginary, the guiding theme that links the three artists together is one of transformation and visionary creation. Mollino/Insides is on view at Collezione Maramotti from 4 October 2020 – 16 May 2021, here we share a selection of exhibition images.

The Collezione Maramotti is featured in the BMW ART GUIDE by INDEPENDENT COLLECTORS.