The Last Work for Naples

Wall Drawing #1267: Scribbles (Morra Greco)
disegnato da: Marco Aliberti, Takeshi Arita, Mario Chianese, Andrea Gallo, Claudio Sorrentino, Wim Starkenburg

Sol LeWitt (1928 Hartford – 2007 New York), internationally recognized as the greatest exponent of conceptual and minimalist art, has overturned the definition and the conventional rules of artistic practice through the abolition of the notions of uniqueness, of unrepeatability, of individual skill in the manual execution in favor of the absolute primacy of the idea.
From this poetic comes the conviction that the work can be performed not by the artist, but by collaborators who participate in the creative process: this is the case of the Wall Drawings, the wall paintings created since the 70s, in the extra-pictorial space par excellence: the wall.
The material transposition of the wall drawings takes place thanks to the work of the assistants and the instructions that Sol LeWitt fixes in small diagrams. What remains in time, therefore, is not the phenomenal, material and contingent design, perishable and finite, but the idea itself that underlies it, that makes it universal, infinitely reproducible and adaptable to the surface that every time welcomes it.
The artist writes in defining his wall drawings: “Every line is as important as any other. All lines become one thing”.

The city of Naples has played an important role in the geography of the art of Sol LeWitt, a city in which he has made numerous exhibitions. Thanks to the privileged relationship between the artist and the Alfonso Artiaco Gallery and the interest that the Neapolitan collector Maurizio Morra Greco has towards the work of Sol LeWitt, during a trip to the city in 2004, the artist knows the architecture of Palazzo Caracciolo of Avellino that would soon become the Fondazione Morra Greco. This then led to the creation by the artist of the Wall drawing belonging to the series of the scribbles, Wall Drawing #1267: Scribbles.

All images Courtesy Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli
© Danilo Donzelli