Teatralità

Architetture per la meraviglia

Patrizia Mussa

April 11, 2025 – June 8, 2025

From April 11 to June 8, 2025, Patrizia Mussa's exhibition Teatralità. Architetture per la meraviglia – curated by Antonio Calbi, promoted by the Municipality of Vicenza, designed and produced by Studio Livio with Gemmo SpA support – exhibits in Basilica Palladiana hall over 60 large-format images with hand-coloring interventions, providing an analysis path of theatricality in architecture.

Among the subjects chosen by the artist are Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza and the theaters of Sabbioneta and Parma, which mark the transition from court theaters to actual theater buildings; Teatro alla Scala in Milan; Teatro San Carlo in Naples; Teatro La Fenice in Venice; Teatro Regio in Turin; Teatro Argentina in Rome; Teatro della Pergola in Florence; Teatro Massimo in Palermo, together with some architectures that testify to the “theatrical” vocation of certain Italian architecture, such as Basilica Palladiana, Reggia di Venaria and Stupinigi, Reggia di Caserta, Palazzo Grimani in Venice.

The exhibition reaches Vicenza after having been set up in prestigious locations: at Palazzo Reale in Milan, at Villa Zito in Palermo, at the Hôtel de Galliffet in Paris, home of the Italian Cultural Institute.

Six new works are exhibited in Vicenza: Piazza dei Signori in Vicenza, a tribute to the Palladian city; furthermore, the Verona Arena, the Procuratie in Venice, the Subalpine Parliament at Palazzo Carignano in Turin and the Ara Pacis in Rome.

In her photographs, Patrizia Mussa uses a language boasting, at first glance, an objectifying nature, due to the use of natural light, the frontal vision, the total focus, which are inserted into a calibrated, rational and crystalline “narrative”. But photography is only the starting point for the artist. After having fixed the view and created the print on cotton paper, Patrizia Mussa intervenes with colored pastels to retrace the details – making it very similar to a painting or a tapestry –, thus marking a definitive distance from the merely photographic language to land in an artistic field still without a name, where the photographic act merges with the pictorial gesture.

“The result is new figurations – curator Antonio Calbi adds – that belong to the concreteness of the existing and its historical data and at the same time emancipate themselves from it, taking on other, almost metaphysical dimensions. […] The theaters photographed and reworked by Patrizia Mussa are formal quintessence, visual poetry, pictorial existentialism without human figures.”

The intent of this particular research by the artist is not to provide a cataloguing of Italian theaters’ architecture, but to relive and restore a personal experience through the artistic gesture: “A work of rigor and rethinking – the photographer explains –, a look with half-closed eyes, the triggering of a dreamlike process, of unraveling, of impoverishment, the search for a root, a soul, another meaning; some sort of X-ray, a retinal or cortical snapshot, imprinted on a thin veil.”

What Patrizia Mussa offers the public are therefore not only descriptive photographs of the sumptuous Italian theatrical architectural heritage, but the very idea of the theater as a place for the community, in which to gather, watch and be watched, a sort of secular temple built “for imagination - Calbi states -, places where the intangible can emerge and therefore are areas of the soul, of vision and listening, of reality replicated on stage, so that it can be better observed. At the same time, they are ‘liminal spaces’ where it is possible to go beyond the real data and try to touch the mystery hiding behind things.”

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