CAPRICES ON PAPER

The Bounty Killart | Marc Chagall | Francisco Goya | Pablo Picasso 

OPENING 
December 11th, from 5 to 8 PM
Piazza Cioccaro 11, Lugano

December 12th – January 31st, 2025

Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to present the exhibition “Caprices on Paper,” a collection of engravings tracing the history of Europe and art in recent centuries, which will open on Wednesday, December 11, from 5 to 8 p.m. at its Lugano headquarters at Piazza Cioccaro 11 (2nd floor). 

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the properly artistic meaning of the term “capriccio”: in the arts, in fact, with this term it is customary to indicate a work that is entirely the result of the author’s imagination, that does not exist in nature or that diverges from the current artistic compositional norms.
With this term, moreover, Francisco Goya titles an entire series of his graphic works.    

The exhibition will feature some 20 etchings by the Turin-based collective The Bounty Killart in dialogue with three great artists of recent centuries: Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828) whose ten etchings from the series of “Los Caprichos” (The Caprices) and “Los desastres de la guerra” (The Disasters of War) are presented; Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) present with four works from “Les Métamorphoses”; and Marc Chagall (1887-1985) whose two etchings belonging to “Fables,” illustrations of Jean de La Fontaine’s moral fables, are exhibited. 

Similarly to what they perform in their sculptural creations, the engravings of The Bounty Killart are inspired by the graphics of past centuries, ranging from the 15th to the 19th century, only to be reworked in a contemporary key and through the artists’ vision, personal but always with universal legibility. Each print in fact stands in clear and open dialogue with the viewer, who, if at first appreciates its aesthetics and beauty, later cannot help but be bewitched and amused by the numerous, sometimes imperceptible, references to our modernity and everyday life. Taking up the entire history of art and ancient mythology, the collective presents an overview of contemporary humanity, highlighting its customs, habits, merits and flaws with extreme respect and at the same time strong irony. 

With the same intent came into being, many decades earlier, Francisco Goya’s “The Caprices,” a series of eighty etchings executed in etching and aquatint during the 1890s that depict, through an acid visual tour-de-force, 18th-century Spain and humanity in general. The eighty works, in fact, were executed with the intention of laying bare with lucid, harsh and sharp images as many varieties of the vices, vilenesses, aberrations and superstitions prevalent in Spain, so as to denounce their brutality and promote their defeat. Subsequent to this is the series “The Disasters of War,” a collection of eighty-three etchings executed from 1810 to 1820 in which Goya offers a critical and personal view of the consequences of the Spanish Peninsular War (1808-14), far removed from the propagandistic images produced by his contemporaries. Here the artist condemns the irrationality of war and the brutality on both sides that inevitably result in suffering, pain, and death. Just as the significance of this series by Goya transcends the visual presentation of a specific conflict and can be considered the first critique of war in general, so too are the works in The Bounty Killart intended to address and investigate universal themes without any specific political invective or action.  
Each creation of The Bounty Killart is a journey, a long imaginative journey that begins in centuries past and in ancient mythology and, detail by detail, arrives at our everyday life.

This same artistic-narrative process was carried out almost a century ago by the celebrated Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who in the book he illustrated entitled Les Métamorphoses, inspired by Ovid’s work of the same name, imagines the Latin writer’s visual world filtered through the eye of his contemporary in which classicism, order and balance metamorphose into tensions, graphic schematizations and impossible interlockings of bodies, rendered with subtle and refined graphics.

Omnivorous consumers of culture, in perpetual search of new stories, works and anecdotes to be inspired by, The Bounty Killart draws inspiration from every literary sphere and cultural sphere: from history to mythology, from music to childhood fairy tales.
It is precisely to the latter that the two engravings by Marc Chagall presented in the exhibition belong. In the late 1920s, Ambroise Vollard-a merchant, collector, publisher, and supporter of avant-garde artists including Pablo Picasso-commissioned etchings from the Russian artist to accompany La Fontaine’s Fables, inspired by both Western and Eastern tales and fables. Humorous, nuanced and ironic, these tales were originally intended for adults, but later entered the educational system and became part of compulsory learning for schoolchildren.
The variety of images in the illustrations for the Fables is astonishing, as is the range of tones brought to light by Chagall’s powerfully etched lines.
Although his creations are among the best illustrations of La Fontaine’s Moral Fables because of their enchanting poetics, the Russian artist was considered by critics an inappropriate choice to illustrate this relatively “classic” work. When Vollard was asked <<Why Chagall?>>, his answer was short and direct: <<Simply because his style seems to me, in a way, akin to La Fontaine’s: at once solid and delicate, realistic and fantastic>>.
These two binomials, solid-delicate and realistic-fantastic, also fit well with the graphics of The Bounty Killart, which on the one hand interweave mythological and fantastic stories with the realism of our contemporary times, and on the other hand address solid and relevant themes with delicacy and ironic lightness. 

Interspersed with the works of the great masters in a harmonious and composed alternation, the collective’s engravings dialogue and coexist with these not only because of their common intentions and inspirations, but also because of their aesthetic and technical consistency. 
Constantly linked and connected to art history, the graphic works of The Bounty Killart might mock the viewer’s eye in that they appear coeval and uniform in appearance to ancient engravings. In fact, the collective places great care and attention in the engraving and intaglio techniques of centuries past in order to reproduce the ancient aesthetic. Starting with digital processing, each drawing is then transferred to copper or zinc plates through a biting action on the metal exerted in the past by an acid called aqua fortis, now by copper sulfate. In the representations therefore, as well as in the execution technique, the dialogue and the continuous cross-reference between the ancient and the modern remain constant.  

The exhibition will remain on display until Jan. 31, 2025 and can be visited Monday through Friday by appointment (art@allegraravizza.com). 
On Saturday, December 14, Allegra Ravizza Gallery will be open to the public during Art Gallery Walk from 2 to 5 p.m. For reservations and more info, click here.

Francisco Goya, Capricho No. 67: Aguarda que te unten/Attento che ti ungono, 1937, 12^Edizione