Better on the screen?

The intention is obviously very noble: to bring into our daily lives a plastic work from the beginning of the 20th century that seems destined to do so. Its aesthetic is so strikingly modern. Year of creation? 1917, not 1971. Didn't the seventies invent anything? With Giacomo Balla, one is seized with a doubt.

It is true that at the time, an artist felt invested with the mission of researching, experimenting and moving, for example, like Balla from futurism to figurative art via abstraction. Today, this would be media suicide. Art has become a theatre in which the actors must always play the same role.

So Balla paints on everything and everywhere. Starting with the walls, floors and ceilings of his own flat in Via Oslavia. The gouache motifs reproduced a century later by Cassina date from this period. So everything is just fine in the best of all possible worlds. All the more so since Balla himself was thinking of using them as screen motifs. So there can be no question of betrayal here. Dreaming of a furniture version of his work, the artist would probably have given his consent to this edition.

Wasn't Italian Futurism the apology of modernity in its most technological aspects? The past was going to be swept away with a broom and then quickly vacuumed. That's true. But the time is not the same. In Balla's time, art was consecrated, understood and respected. It could innocently and with impunity spill over into decoration. It was still art. Today, the Lipovetskian aestheticisation of the world, in itself, already tends to make art a mere decoration.

Is it necessary to add another layer? It may even be dangerous, in terms of cultural issues, to give a work of art a purpose. As in this case with a screen. Solution? Take a look at 330 Paravento as vintage as it is.

Photo: Giacomo Balla - 330 Paravento - 1917 - Cassina