Mario Schifano, when pop has soul and grace

"One must return to the steps already taken, to repeat them, and to trace new paths alongside them. One must begin the journey again. Always,' wrote José Saramago. We do not know if Mario Schifano had read the Portuguese, but certainly these words of his are perhaps the best viaticum for approaching the poetics of this immense painter to whom the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome is dedicating an incontrovertibly unmissable retrospective that has the word "regeneration" as its common thread.

Because amidst the immeasurable vicissitudes that characterised his art as well as his biography, Schifano's voracious and prolific journey, who worked by juxtaposition, often by simplification, contamination, reduction, subtraction, fragmentation, unfinished and monochrome, and who always experimented, crossing photography, cinema, advertising, digital images, cement and shiny Plexiglas surfaces with profound levity, thus updated his painting each time in the sign of an inexhaustible sensitivity and passion.

Pop yes, even, but a pop with great soul and grace was his, able to look at America with the awareness that only certain adopted Romans have.

"The tender and very sensitive core of his soul is his passion for painting," wrote critic Cesare Vivaldi in 1963 of the young Schifano.

 With a collection of over one hundred of the most representative works of his poetics and from from public and private collections in Italy and abroad, the exhibition Curated by Daniela Lancioni, with a particularly chronological approach, it retraces Schifano's artistic biography through his main visual inventions: from the works of the early years to the present day.125rem;">beginnings of the 1950s, informal and material, to the first monochromes of the 1960s, from the season inaugurated with the exhibition Tutto in 1963 at the Galleria Odyssia in Rome to the new iconographies mediated by the language of photography and the figures of art history (from the Futurists to Malevič), from TV Landscapes to cinema to the outsized paintings of the 1980s and the works of the 1990s, in which the artist's sensitivity to social emergencies was most explicitly manifested.