Sette Stagioni dello Spirito. Gian Maria Tosatti

From 2013 to 2016 the whole city of Naples was involved in the impressive multi-year project Sette Stagioni dello Spirito (“Seven Seasons of the Spirit”) by Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980). For the conception and realization of the project, the artist retraced the path of Il castello interiore (“The interior castle”, 1577), the book where St. Teresa of Avila subdivides the human soul into seven rooms, transfigured by Tosatti into as many, monumental environmental installations. A work in progressive formation, polysemic and with complex outcomes, which seeks to redefine the relationship between art and community, being conceived as a single great urban novel, visual and performative, which, by exploring the city and the communitarian dimension of civil life, probes the human soul suspended between the antithetical but complementary limits of good and evil.

The final exhibition renders the memory of this collective experience and reconstructs its walkthrough at the same time behind the scenes, enabling the public to retrace it in its overall articulation and recount its intimate dimension, until they reach the threshold of the artist’s studio to grasp and witness the overlapping of the decisions and changes, the preliminary drawings, preparatory sketches, documents and remains of the creative workshop presented as a diary, crammed with notes and erasures, conceived for the “city and its inhabitants.”

Sette Stagioni dello Spirito will be displayed in two areas of Madre museum: in the Project room on the ground floor and in seven galleries on the second floor. The Project Room will exhibits the floor of the artist’s studio during his stay in Naples and his diary, together with a feature film recounting the impressive process of making this work. The walkthrough on the second floor, by contrast, is conceived as a sequence of seven “mental rooms” embodying the seven themes of the Sette Stagioni dello Spirito: ignorance, inertia, error, salvation, ascension, doing good and destiny.

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