Mario Schifano

 

“There is no difference between seeing and recording.”
(Mario Schifano) 

What Cesare Vivaldi identified in 1963 as the “tender and highly sensitive core” of Mario Schifano’s soul is not merely an emotional inclination toward painting, but a true ontological condition: a radical exposure to the world, a vulnerability that becomes a sensitive surface, a site of passage. In this perspective, painting is not a practice but a destiny; not a profession, but a form of existence that is consumed in seeing and in restoring visibility. 

It is to this primary quality—irreducible to any historical or stylistic categorization—that the exhibition seeks to give form. It does so not simply by bringing together over one hundred emblematic works from public and private collections, but by constructing a space in which Schifano’s trajectory reveals itself as a continuous redefinition of vision. The works do not appear as stages in a linear path, but as emergences, epiphanies that testify to an incessant tension between perception and image, between memory and appearance. 

The curatorial project by Daniela Lancioni does not limit itself to a chronological reconstruction, but attempts to disclose the conditions of possibility of each phase, as if every pictorial cycle were the result of a rupture, a crisis that compels the artist to reinvent his language. From the early material experiments of the 1950s—where painting still seems to interrogate its own physical consistency—to the monochromes, which present themselves as suspended surfaces, almost perceptual zeroings, up to the turning point of the 1960s, when the image opens itself to the flow of media and citation, incorporating fragments of art history and contemporary visual culture. 

Within this movement, Schifano’s painting takes shape as a device of absorption and relaunch: the Futurists, Kazimir Malevič, photography, cinema, television—everything is absorbed and transformed into an unstable field, where the image is never given once and for all, but constantly called into question. The TV Landscapes, for instance, are not mere transcriptions of mediated reality, but interrogations into the very status of vision in the age of mechanical reproducibility. 

The exhibition space of Palazzo Esposizioni thus becomes a topography of metamorphosis. The rotunda and the grand halls of the piano nobile do not simply organize the works, but accompany their becoming, allowing subterranean connections, returns, and deviations to emerge. 
The biographical dimension, introduced through photographs and documents, does not serve an illustrative function, but acts as a counterpoint to the work: it does not explain, but intensifies. 

In this context, even the most concrete elements—such as the reconstruction of the 1968 dining room or the complete presentation of Schifano’s film production—cease to be mere documents and become perceptual environments, thresholds through which to enter a different experience of time and space.
 Cinema, in particular, is not for Schifano a parallel language, but an extension of painting, a way of pushing the image beyond its fixity toward an unstable and open temporality. 

“I use cinema to see painting more clearly.”
(Mario Schifano) 

What ultimately emerges is not only the figure of a protagonist of the second half of the twentieth century, but that of an artist who inhabited his time without ever being reduced to it, maintaining with contemporaneity a relationship that is not ideological but existential: an uneasy proximity, made of attraction and resistance. The works of the 1980s and 1990s, marked by a more explicit sensitivity to social tensions, do not represent a rupture, but rather a further transformation of that same original “core,” which continues to pulse as an open question. 

The retrospective thus presents itself not as a summation, but as a field of forces: an invitation to think of painting not as a finished object, but as an ongoing process, as a place where the visible exposes itself to its own instability and, within it, finds its most authentic necessity. 

“Painting is never sufficient unto itself.”
(Mario Schifano) 

The exhibition is part of Palazzo Esposizioni’s ongoing commitment to the study and promotion of figures and movements that have significantly shaped Italian visual culture since the mid-twentieth century, with particular—though not exclusive—attention to the city of Rome. The initiative is included within a broader program of research dedicated to key figures and moments in Roman and Italian art history from the 1950s to the 1970s, which has recently featured monographic exhibitions devoted to Cesare Tacchi, Jim Dine, Don McCullin, Boris Mikhailov, and Carla Accardi. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Electa, which includes, alongside the curator’s essay, contributions by art historians who have recently produced innovative studies on the artist: Manuel Barrese, Fabio Belloni, Stefano Chiodi, Andrea Cortellessa, Giorgio Di Domenico, Flavio Fergonzi, Giorgia Gastaldon, Francesco Guzzetti, and Chiara Perin. 

As with the exhibition itself, the texts address the different phases of the artist’s work, while a specific chapter is devoted to the imaginative titles of Schifano’s works.