Towards Annunciazione. Nanni Valentini. The final years.

On 19 January 1984 a one-man exhibition of work by Nanni Valentini was inaugurated in the Contemporary Art Pavilion Milan. It was the first public recognition of his work, by now at the pinnacle of his brief period of maturity. The works shown there have become milestones in his career: Deriva, Il dialogo, and above Annunciazione, the work with which his idea of a possible statuary and an oblique confrontation with the sacred, between physical and metaphysical, resurfaced powerfully.

The catalogue that accompanied that exhibition included the testimonies of some fellow travellers – Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, Umberto Galimberti, Francesco Leonetti, Giorgio Soro – who situated Nanni’s work in the lively interstice of problems connected with form and matter. Regrettably, that extraordinary conflagration was soon extinguished. Valentini passed away without warning on 5 December 1985.

Today the ABC-ARTE gallery revives that extraordinary moment by reconstructing almost entirely the 1984 exhibition, with the addition of a few pieces intended to document that period, under the title Towards Annunciazione. Nanni Valentini. The final years. It is a fitting tribute to Valentini at a moment when the profundity of his mastery has been largely understood, and of a critical rethinking of the sensational anomaly represented at that time by those works. Flaminio Gualdoni, who curated the 1984 exhibition in the Milanese Pavilion, resumes the threads of that discourse and draws them to extreme results in a contemporary critical interpretation with the support of Luca Bochicchio.