©Elio e Stefano Ciol snc

Curated by Ubaldo Casotto In collaboration with The William Congdon Foundation

Reversing the famous phrase from The Little Prince (“The essential is invisible to the eyes”) is not a game; it is the essence of William Congdon’s painting, a representative of New York’s action painting who, after a long journey and painting, settled in Italy, first in Venice, then in Assisi, and finally in Gudo Gambaredo in the Milanese Lowlands, where he died in 1998.

For him, painting is an “adventure of the gaze” that captures the essence of what is seen. It is a grave mistake to call him an abstract painter: “I always started from a concrete object that struck my eye.”

The essential? He puts it this way: “For me, Cézanne’s apples are more sacred than Raphael’s Madonnas. Cézanne put all the sacredness of the Madonna into the apples. This is the thing; this is the ‘appleness’ of Cézanne’s apples: they are not apples; they are ‘applenesses’; they are the Madonna of the apples.”

The heart of the exhibition is a long interview from 1992. In the first part, Congdon talks about the places of his life, his travels around the world, and the paintings linked to them, which scroll on the screen with his words as a background. In the second part, the artist is in the foreground, filmed in his studio at Cascinazza, speaking about how he creates his “children,” the solitude, the war, traveling, staying still, the dying vulture, and the Crucifix.

Displayed on multiple monitors along the exhibition path, the interview is accompanied by a selection of thirteen paintings owned by The William Congdon Foundation, an unpublished piece from Santorini brought back to Italy by a private collector, and a sculpture (Secular Pietà) kindly lent by the Municipality of Buccinasco.