by Marco Pierini
in uscita a settembre 2020
Published by Magonza, the book documents the temporary solo exhibition Reflected, created by the influential visual artist, composer and musician Brian Eno (Woodbridge, Suffolk UK, 1948) and hosted in the rooms of the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia from 4 September 2020 to 10 January 2021.
The show is produced in collaboration with Atlante Servizi Culturali, and presents three works in dialogue with masterpieces by the most representative artists in the museum’s collection, namely Piero della Francesca (Polyptych of Saint Anthony), Beato Angelico (Guidalotti Polyptych) and Perugino (Pietà).
Brian Eno, a ‘musician-non-musician’ as he defines himself, the inventor of ambient music, a record producer and visual artist, has always sought to combine various arts in his work:
‘Painting and music have always been interwoven for me. I started playing with light as a medium at about the same time I started playing with sound when a teenager. When I look back on what I’ve made over the intervening years it seems to me I’ve been trying to slow music down so it became more like painting, and to animate paintings so that they became more like music… in the hope that the two activities would meet and fuse in the middle.’
The exhibition provides an unprecedented dialogue between the historic masterpieces and Eno’s own Lightboxes, whose ever-changing combinations of seductive ‘colour landscapes’ are self-generated using a series of interlinked LED lights. By extending temporal boundaries with a work that apparently has neither beginning, end, nor narrative, Eno invites people to stay in one place for a while. As he points out: ‘If a painting is hanging on a wall we don’t feel that we’re missing something by not paying attention to it. Yet with music and video, we still have the expectation of some kind of drama. My music and videos do change, but they change slowly. And they change in such a way that it doesn’t matter if you miss a bit.’
The exhibition will be further enhanced by Raphael Revisited (2011), a silk screen print by English artist Tom Phillips (London, 1937). Phillips became a friend and collaborator of Eno’s in 1964 at Ipswich Art School, which Eno attended and where Phillips taught.
The print was inspired by a late fifteenth-century votive tablet conserved at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and attributed to a very young Raphael. Eno used Phillip’s print for the cover of his 1975 album Another Green World.
Il percorso espositivo sarà arricchito inoltre da Raphael Revisited (2011), una serigrafia dell’artista inglese Tom Phillips (Londra, 1937), legato a Brian Eno da un legame di amicizia e collaborazione, iniziata nel 1964 alla Ipswich Art School, nella quale Phillips insegnava.
L’opera trae ispirazione da una tavoletta votiva, databile alla fine del Quattrocento, di un anonimo pittore umbro identificato in precedenza con un giovanissimo Raffaello (conservata alla Walker Art Gallery di Liverpool) che verrà utilizzata da Eno per la copertina dell’album Another Green World.
