SERGIO MONARI
Sincronie

26 February – 5 May 2025
Venice, Fortuny Museum

Curated by
Niccolò Lucarelli
Chiara Squarcina

Sergio Monari’s artworks explore the complexity of Graeco-Roman classicism. His sculptures stand as critical reinterpretations of contemporary society, taking as a model the classical world which, although not without defects, had beauty as its supreme ideal, as the goal of a civil journey made up of coherence and spirituality, and which had in myth both a spiritual and social frame of reference, serving as a bridge between experience and the order of the cosmos.

Monari questions the importance of myth in the construction of social institutions, without debasing it in itself, but attacking the inability of contemporary society to acknowledge its significance. Poetry, love, glory, war, destiny, time, vanity and death take form in a sort of fiction that is ancient yet always new, through an arrangement that unfolds, work after work, in chapters modelled in the form of human features, drives, aspirations, doubts and fears. A human comedy made up of statues that live on through their narrative power, characters embodied in the three-dimensionality of bronze.

Through this narrative, the ground floor of the Museo Fortuny is transformed into a theatrical stage that ranges between eras through sculpture made up of glances and words, perceived as both pungent and provocative, passionate and poetic, sculpture that possesses a narrative charge capable of kindling the drama before the viewer’s gaze.

Despite their conflictual character, Monari’s sculptures reveal the urgency to recover the spiritual dimension, and by virtue of this they present themselves to the observer as so many fleeting hierophanies, ephemeral revelations of that sacredness that once belonged to the individual.

Monari’s presence at Palazzo Fortuny, therefore, stresses the need to strengthen and make relevant the dialogue with that Graeco-Roman culture that is the foundation of our society. Through his work we can rediscover modernity, as happened with Mariano Fortuny, who translated the values and symbols of classical antiquity into a contemporary and timeless language by his iconic garments and the decorative patterns of his printed fabrics.

Admission to the exhibition from 26 February to 5 May 2025 with the Museum’s hours and ticket.