Sansepolcro (AR), with “The color inside” on display the works of Francesco Dindelli

Sansepolcro (AR), with “The color inside” on display the works of Francesco Dindelli.

Works preserved at the museum are also on display Humanities library of the Arezzo branch of the University of Siena at the exhibition “The color inside. the gaze of a 900th century artist”, set up in Sansepolcro and which traces the existence and artistic production of Francesco Dindelli (Sansepolcro, 1917-1986), for many years hospitalized at the then psychiatric hospital of Arezzo, now the university center of Pionta.

The exhibition project “I colore Inside” is on display until January 8th at Palazzo Alberti in Sansepolcro, with the idea of ​​bringing to light the complex artistic work of Francesco Dindelli.

Drawings, paintings, ceramics, photographs, objects - there are almost 90 works on display - were also recovered thanks to extensive research in the area carried out by the organizing committee, the curator Alessandra Baroni, the Municipality of Sansepolcro, the biturgense association L'Accademia; all this with the support of many lenders, including the Humanities Library of the University of Siena, which holds the family's donation, which adds to other precious donations that have occurred in recent years: the sorting and inventorying activity is curated - like the entire Archives Section of the Library - by the doctor Lucilla Gigli with the coordination of the director of the Doctor Library Eleonora Bassi.

Among the documents preserved in the archives of the former neuropsychiatric hospital, the health events of Francesco Dindelli have been traced. The medical records testify to Dindelli's life seen from the perspective of the doctors who treated him, telling of his reactions during the psychological recovery process he experienced in Arezzo.

The exhibition displays much of Francesco Dindelli's production, not only to remember the painful experiences of his life, first a prisoner of war in India and Australia and then hospitalized in the Arezzo psychiatric facility, but also and above all to highlight his extraordinary artistic quality, his deep interest in color.

The third section of the exhibition is dedicated to the years of hospitalization at the Neurological and Psychiatric Hospital of Arezzo, “Segregation" in which there is a very large number of drawings dated from 1959 to 1965 and made in graphite, charcoal, black pencil, blue ballpoint pen and black pen on white or squared paper. They depict the many faces and bodies of the patients who with Francis shared the restraint and a destiny of deprivation of freedom, marginalization but also self-isolation.

The recovery work carried out by the University of Siena is precious: the drawings made during the first years of his hospitalization at the Arezzo Psychiatric Hospital from 1959 to 1965 are preserved in the Humanistic Library of the University Library System.

«Francesco Dindelli's closeness to the artistic culture of the twentieth century is strong, in particular to Rosai, Casorati, – we read in the catalog edited by Alessandra Baroni – but also to the Italian avant-garde of Morandi and Guttuso with whom he aligns himself for his moving gaze on faces and poses of the humble people who are often the subjects of his portraits; but also for the plastic and expressive value of the chromatic forms in his paintings of still lifes, birds and vases. A strongly three-dimensional vision also characterizes the vast corpus of Francesco's drawings created by him especially between 1941 and 1965, in the years of his imprisonment and hospitalization at the psychiatric hospital of Arezzo (1959-1972), marked by a limited availability of means technicians who however see the consolidation of an absolutely original and effective graphic style in its expressive power".

The exhibition can be visited until January 8th with free entry.