Monza: Claudio Borghi in the name of Calvino at the Expiatory Chapel

Monza: Claudio Borghi in the name of Calvino at the Expiatory Chapel.

The Lombardy Regional Museums Directorate has dedicated 2023 to the great writer Italo Calvino, to celebrate the centenary of his birth. A writer with a thousand paths, a frequent visitor to exhibitions, a lover of art and museums, this author has always combined words with images with great wisdom, evoking them, telling them, inventing them.

This is the key to understanding the choice to host in Expiatory Chapel an exhibition of Claudio Borghi, for the discovered affinity between his works and the poetics of the Italian writer.

When you walk along little-traveled roads, you stare at the horizon in an attempt to catch silhouettes of a familiar landscape in the distance, of something that makes the route familiar to you. This is what Claudio Borghi's art making and his descriptions have in common “Invisible cities” by Italo Calvino: a glimpse into the distance and then focusing as you gradually get closer.

One with sculpture, the other with writing, they provide descriptive elements, but not too much, which can allow you to immerse yourself in the atmospheres they create: woods and trees, cities and people. With each new meeting something changes, they are a little different and not only due to the effect of time that passes. And both find a place in a place created to crystallize the moment, to stop its passing, to remember: the Expiatory Chapel.

The presence of the sculptures and the spirit of the invisible cities hover along an ideal path that leads from the entrance to the chapel, then to the garden and finally to the crypt. Works that create a dialogue between the interior and exterior of the monument, between history and contemporaneity, involving the natural elements and man's artifices. Barely whispered images poised between reality and fantasy: “Cities, like dreams, are built of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides another ”, writes Calvino. “Because the eye does not see things but figures of things that signify other things.”

Claudio Borghi was born in Barlassina in 1954. He graduated from high school and the Brera Academy. His first exhibition was in 1978 at the Galleria elle Ore of Giovanni Fumagalli and Giuliana Pacini, in conjunction with the Sculpture Biennial of the Municipality of Arese at the Villa Medici-Burba of RHO as a representative of the students of Brera. He has participated in national and international collective exhibitions, including “Asti Scultura,” curated by Mario De Micheli, XXIX ^, XXX ^, XXXI ^ edition of the Biennale of Milano. Since then you have held regular solo exhibitions at the Galleria delle Ore and, subsequently, at the Galleria Spaziotemporaneo in Milano. His works are part of important Italian and foreign collections. He created the large sculpture/theatre for the square of the municipality of Barlassina accompanied by the monographic volume "...dalle cinque alle sette" published by Silvana Editoriale d'Arte with texts by Maddalena Mazzocut-mis, Simona Bartolena and Anna Comino (2014), the volume The silence of things edited by Luca Pietro Nicoletti (2018) and The surroundings of things, edited by Lorenzo Fiorucci, Editoriale Umbra ed. Recently you set up a personal exhibition in the secrets of Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci and inaugurated the monument Angolo di bosco for the ASECSI association in S. Vito al Tagliamento (Friuli VG). In November 2021 you published the volume: In distance in the Morfologie series by Mimesis editore. Steps for an unsuspecting sculpture.