From July 11 to September 22 2019 Casa Museo Jorn presents the solo exhibition of Salvatore Arancio: Like a sort of Pompeii in reverse, curated by Luca Bochicchio, artistic director of the Museum. The exhibition is promoted by the Friends of Jorn’s House Association, under the patronage of the Municipality of Albissola Marina.

After participating in the 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2017) and the solo exhibition at the White Chapel in London (2018), Salvatore Arancio arrived in Albissola with a new and site-specific project, designed and realized in situ.

Between 2017 and 2019 Arancio made numerous visits and several surveys to Casa Museo Jorn, fascinated by the situationist labyrinth that the Danish artist Asger Jorn created between 1957 and 1973 together with his friend and assistant Umberto (Berto) Gambetta.

More than by any other aspect or space in the house, Arancio was impressed bythepolateraterial and pseudo-organic concretions created by Jorn and Berto in the garden, where he noticed not only the poetry of their inventive play, but the imaginative and creative potential of what we cannot see.

The artist hastherefore started an experimental research, based on the modeling of the clay directly onto the shapes, surfaces and volumes of the garden, plastically detecting its negative aspects while reflecting on what cannot be seen but only potentially may exist. Arancio focused in particular on the many elements of uncertain origin (natural or artificial) and of ambiguous and ironic paternity (by Jorn or Berto), to establish a relationship of continuity in Jorn's discourse on metamorphosis and imagination; a dialogue that develops from the language of ceramic sculpture, common to both Jorn and Arancio, and based on the complicity and collaboration of the genius loci: the local artisan shops. Arancio has in fact chosen to take advantage of the collaboration of the Nuova Fenice of Barbara Arto for the third firing ceramics, and of that of the Ceramiche San Giorgio for the enameling of the pieces modeled at Casa Jorn. This last studio was founded in 1958 in Albissola Marina and is still run by Giovanni Poggi, a turner potter who worked with over two hundred artists in his life, starting with some great personalities from the 50s and 60s who were present in Albissola (Agenore Fabbri, Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, Gianni Dova, Wifredo Lam, Mario Rossello among many others). Casa Jorn is full of stories and traces of the collaboration between Jorn, Berto and Giovanni Poggi: Arancio wished to trace these collaborations between the artists and the craftsman.

During the ongoing project and during the frequent occasions of confrontation between the artist and the curator, the title of the exhibition was chosen: Like a sort of Pompeii in reverse is in fact a quote from the text that Guy Debord wrote in 1973 for Jorn’s book Le Jardin d'Albisola, created by Ezio Gribaudo for the Fratelli Pozzo Art Editions of Turin and published posthumously in 1974. Aranciotherefore proposes his own vision, which appears to have more than one contact with the interpretation of Jorn's garden given by Debord. What for Debord was the situationist result of Jorn's architectural experience, for Arancio it is the possibility of imagining the shapes, volumes and surfaces of the garden as casts of a space in the making, initial matrices born from the indistinguishable combined action of time, man's work and chance. The sculptures created starting from this inspiration will first experience an integrated dialogue with the garden spaces, after which they will be placed inside Jorn’s studio, in special classifying cabinets that will be offered to the visitor's analytical gaze, as archaeological findings of an invisible imaginary universe.