Lucca Film Festival, two not-to-be-missed exhibitions anticipate 2022 edition

Bill Viola, The Seventies at the Ragghianti Foundation and Mystified, works by Luca Bellandi, at the Church of San Cristoforo

The LUCCA FILM FESTIVAL will make its spring appointment with two exhibitions: Bill Viola, The Seventies at the Fondazione Ragghianti and Mystified, works by Luca Bellandi, at the Chiesa di San Cristoforo. The two events, supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca with the patronage of the City of Lucca and the Region of Tuscany, anticipate the 2022 edition of the LFF, which this year will be held in autumn, from 23 September to 2 October.

Bill Viola, The Seventies is a tribute to the beginnings of one of the most important international video-art artists. The exhibition, curated by Maurizio Marco Tozzi and Alessandro Romanini, will be on display in the mezzanine of the Fondazione Ragghianti until 8 May, in collaboration with Over The Real. The exhibition presents one of the major international contemporary artists, focusing on a specific period of his activity: the 1970s, when he was one of the undisputed pioneers of the language of video art. Bill Viola (New York, 1951) graduated in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 and the following year began his career as technical director at the production studio art/tapes/22 in Florence, where he stayed for 18 months, frequenting Zona no-profit art space. In the exhibition we find the historical videos made from 1977 to 1980 - The Reflecting Pool, Moonblood, Silent Life, Ancient of Days and Vegetable Memory - which represent his first great successes, together with a selection of photographs by Gianni Melotti, taken in those same years, documenting the first experiences of the young Bill Viola, together with other artists from all over the world, who converged in Maria Gloria Bicocchi's Florentine space to start using the new magnetic tape technologies.

Chris Burden e Bill Viola © Copyright Gianni Melotti

Mystified brings together in the Church of San Cristoforo the latest pictorial production of Luca Bellandi, about twenty large canvases dedicated to the films that have made the history of Cinema great. The exhibition, which will run until 27 May, is curated by Riccardo Ferrucci and organised in collaboration with Casa d'Arte San Lorenzo. In Mystified, Luca Bellandi has chosen to exhibit his latest pictorial research, through about twenty works in different formats. "This project", says the artist, "triggered something in me, I felt I had to explore something different". The source of inspiration are the films that have fascinated and moved him, such as La dolce vita, Il Gattopardo and Metropolis, cinematographic masterpieces that Bellandi reworks in his works in a totally new way. To create his canvases, he has acted like a true actor: he reinterprets the character assigned to him, dissects it and divides it into many parts and then, in the end, makes it his own. In this way, the painter from Livorno penetrates the films he has chosen in a very personal way: he selects specific frames, mixes them together, giving us another, fascinating and captivating image, which certainly does not leave the spectator indifferent, but rather invites him to return to the painting, to pause and ask himself questions. Hence the title of the exhibition Mystified.

Luca Bellandi LE CITTA APERTE