GOAL!

GOAL!

Betty Bee | Carmela De Falco | Giulio Delvè | Piero Golia | Marco Pio Mucci | Giulia Piscitelli | Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo | Vincenzo Rusciano | Antonio Serrapica | Vedovamazzei

GOAL! is a group exhibition involving ten Neapolitan artists of different generations who through different languages and paths have been invited, on the occasion of the Napoli team’s victory in the Serie A championship, to give their own reading of the action of the goal, celebrating the team’s fortune and the city’s involvement in the event.

From painting to drawing, photography to installation, the works on display on the third floor of Fondazione Morra Greco trace a path of practices and research that together provide an intergenerational overview of the work of some artists from Naples and the broader Campania region.

The exhibition project is funded from the resources of the POC Campania FESR 2014/2020, Strategic Plan Culture and Cultural Heritage Programming 2021 Global Forum – Contemporary Art Exhibitions EDI 2021.

GOAL! 

text by Giulia Pollicita

There are two aspects of the goal that seem to be interesting to me. One is the coefficient of unpredictability beyond calculation that cooperates in its realization. The other is the spontaneous, immediate, equally unpredictable reaction, positive or negative, that follows it: the jubilation, the shout, the equal and opposite outburst to the shooter of the beholder or the sufferer of the goal. The unexpected release of an instinct.

The idea for the exhibition stems from the desire to celebrate Napoli’s championship victory. Ten artists of different generations, united by a punctual link of birth or an enduring one with the city, through different practices, languages and approaches to research, participate in this exhibition by telling their idea of goal, their contextualization of the winning action and their reading of the meaning or circumstances, immediate or distant, that surround it. A goal that is no longer pure ballistic mechanics of the shot or the ball, but part of life and art. 

The invitation to participate in the exhibition is accompanied by the goals of the Napoli team, the cheers of the fans, the continuous unpredictability of the results (the party was postponed), and the return flights of those who were away and wanted to be here on the day of the party.

Yet, this exhibition is not an exhibition about soccer, it is not an exhibition about Naples, or an exhibition that intends to tell, by reducing it, some form of identity. It is an exhibition of artworks that perform (thematically or otherwise) the goal in its English sense, of the objective, straight and directed toward a point: the honest and spontaneous execution. The perfect alchemy of a ping-pong, of a dribble, of a net. The space in which the exhibition attempts to move thus eschews attempts at universality and reductionism – identitarian or artistic. Rather, it seeks to propose an overview of impromptu-thought works, as free as an exultation, as a GOAL!

This attempt is borrowed and motivated, like a recording or a photograph that captures some fragment of it but does not exhaust its controversial complexities, by the celebration of the present moment. The works, conceived specifically for the exhibition, presented for the first time or repurposed ad hoc for this occasion, are the result of an unpredictable and extemporaneous exchange and dialogue with the artists. And in a small way, they all attempt to return a fragment but not the totality of the operating method, processes and poetics of the artists invited to take part in GOAL!

Betty Bee‘s (Naples, 1963) work, Network (2023), is a painting of a globe that the artist observes from a hidden point in the Universe, thus having a vision of the planet enveloped by the weave of a net pierced by the flight of an airplane that, passing through it, widens and modifies its meshes. The net, with a dividing but also protective value, distances the work from reality and functions as an entrance to another dimension: the purified one of art and the imaginative transfiguration of pictorial color.

Carmela De Falco‘s (Avellino, 1994) installation, Imprevisto (2023), uses a soccer net focusing on the rhythmic chiseling of its weave. Interrupting this mathematical succession, the small brass element that makes up the work inserts a sudden element of dystonia, an unexpected deviation, within an inalienable order.

Giulio Delvè‘s (Naples, 1984) installation, Qualchetesta (2018), site-specifically repurposed for GOAL!, has a group of heads lined up and silhouetted in space like an assault team: between Mohicans and punks, a lineup of young actors who make up the imaginary of a generation that grew up among the post-industrial waste of the suburbs, the transformation of cities, and social centers.

Si Organizzano Spettacoli di Magia (2022) is a lithograph by Piero Golia (Naples, 1974) made as part of the Laboratorio Piramide residency project at the historic Litografia Bulla in Rome. Summarizing the correlation between conceptual, mechanical-executive datum and randomness, the work summarizes the “magical” character inherent in Piero Golia’s poetics.

L’opera struggente di un formidabile artista campano (2023) is the title of the installation by Marco Pio Mucci (Benevento, 1990), which is composed of a polyptych of drawings on paper and the frame of a scooter found on the streets of Naples that evoke the artist’s lost adolescence among the rutted streets of Campania and one of the media icons of this football season.

Giulia Piscitelli’s (Naples, 1965) work, Mr. Z, is a set of six unpublished polaroids from the artist’s private archive connected to the project Mr. Z (2008), presented at the 2009 Furla Prize, focused on the theme of freedom and identity through the objects of a Fedayn.

Campione (2023) is an oil self-portrait by Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo (Naples, 1990). The artist, portrayed as a Napoli soccer player figurine, self-represents himself as the champion that every soccer-loving father in Naples in those years would have wanted, immortalizing, ironically, the unfulfilled expectations of an entire generation.

Vincenzo Rusciano‘s sculpture (Naples, 1973), Nel rettangolo magico (2023) opens in space like a portal that collects visions and material suggestions. The composition of resulting elements, which recombine in a new magnetic field of balances, draws a geometry of bodies suspended in space inside and outside a magic rectangle.

The series of paintings created by Antonio Serrapica (Castellammare di Stabia, 1960) declines the theme of goal by traversing the artist’s pictorial imagination that portrays a transfigured world, in which everyday and social conflicts are sublimated into a sarcastic smile on nature, landscape and society.

The installation by the duo Vedovamazzei, born in 1991 from the collaboration of Stella Scala (1964) and Simeone Crispino (1962), Napoli da Morra Greco (2023), made specifically for GOAL! and tailored to the story of the Fondazione’s president, Maurizio Morra Greco, represents the walking path from Maradona Stadium in Naples to Ascarelli Stadium in via Argine in Ponticelli and tells the story of the collector’s biographical and family connection with soccer.

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