MEN ABOUT ROME
CASA DE CHIRICO
WORDS BY LUCA LO PINTO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PIOTR NIEPSUJ
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
The house that painter Giorgio de Chirico lived in (largely isolating himself from the world) is located in a centuries-old palace, with complex layers of self-historicization condensed into a domestic space. A time-capsule-meets-Wunderkammerdecorated in a bizarre pastiche of styles, Casa de Chirico is an expanded portrait of the Pictor Optimus—an avant-garde foe of modernity and the ultimate archetypal 20th-century artist.
I often dream that I am walking on a sloping floor covered with snakeskin, where I slide relentlessly as if it were freshly polished parquet.
The floor of the house at Piazza di Spagna 31, where Giorgio de Chirico lived from 1948 to 1978, is covered with herringbone parquet flooring not unlike that which appears in the “Bagni Misteriosi” series, the origins of which he once recounted: “The idea of the ‘bagni misteriosi' came to me once when I was in a house where the floor had been highly polished with wax. I looked at a gentleman walking in front of me whose legs reflected in the floor. I had the impression that he could sink into that floor, like into a pool; that he could move and even swim there. So I imagined strange pools with men immersed in that kind of water-parquet, standing still, moving, and sometimes stopping to converse with other men who stood outside the floor-pool.”
The house of the Pictor Optimus is located at the very center of the world and can transport those visiting it for the first time into this dreamlike dimension. It is located inside a 17th-century palace and has two floors. The first floor has large rooms, including a living room, dining room, and kitchen, while the smaller second floor features two rooms and the artist’s studio.
It has been open to the public for many years and, among all the house-museums that exist, it is particularly special in that it has been left intact. It is a time capsule, an expanded portrait of the ultimate archetypal 20th-century artist, an avant-garde foe of modernity with an intellectual scorn that led him to isolate himself almost all his life and who experienced, after the rejection of the Surrealists, a lack of recognition from critics and the market. With lots of his own idiosyncrasies and rejection of the norm, he always swam against the tide, creating an admirable and courageous mise en abyme of his work and person.
De Chirico died in his 90s on November 20, 1978, leaving posterity with the difficult task of unraveling the dense and enigmatic textures of his art.
“Walking through the rooms of this house-museum, rather than presented with a linear narrative, we are surrounded by works in which the painter returns to his own history with many d’après.”
The late de Chirico, despite being astonishingly contemporary, is still naively ignored today. Walking through the rooms of the home that de Chirico cohabited with his second wife Isabella, we are surrounded mainly by works in which the painter returns to his own history with many d’après. There’s a kind of self-historicization condensed into a domestic space that comprises a bizarre pastiche of styles: Louis XVI sofas coexist with 17th-century console tables and accessories that imitate antique taste. It is a place that is both a private and working space. Going up to the second floor, we are confronted by the entrance to two rooms: a monastic one where the master slept and a more bourgeois one reserved for lady Isabella: separate rooms for a lasting union. Like many painters, de Chirico had his own rituals and schedule. Sleeping within walking distance of the atelier was a luxury. Still on display today is the last painting he was working on, which remained unfinished: a d’après of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo.
Between bottles of Punt e Mes, wooden cherubs, portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, and bronze statues, we find ourselves inside a quagmire of replicas of metaphysical themes: backdated works, autographed copies, and art forgeries.
The house is a perfect film set where, as in his paintings, a perturbing condition is nurtured within a conventional real. It is impossible not to notice the absence of works by other artists, except for a photograph of his brother Alberto Savinio with whom he had an esteemed but tormented relationship. Both admirable artists as much as extraordinary writers, the brothers remained convinced that to dream and imagine, there is no need to invent another reality, because the one before our eyes is sufficient.
There is a beautiful color photograph in which de Chirico retires on a terrace with an admirable view. “I look to the right, toward the north, where the beautiful Villa Medici with its imposing park stands; once this villa was home to painters such as Fragonard, David and Ingres; today it houses Prix de Rome who come to the Urbe to paint certain modernist scenes that they could easily paint on the banks of the Seine.”
As in the case of other house-museums dedicated to figures such as John Soane, Mario Praz, and Luis Barragán, the visitor’s experience here is far removed from that of a conventional museum. In fact, these places are closer to the idea of Wunderkammern and Gesamtkunstwerks, in which every element has an influence and a linear narrative is not imposed on the viewer, but, on the contrary, it is the visitor who builds continuous narrative threads. In 2012, I organized a year-long exhibition here, “D’après Giorgio” (After Giorgio), in which artists participated its making and continued to build it up over the course of its run, with new works being added from time to time. It was the first time that contemporary artists had the opportunity to dialogue with these spaces through works produced for the occasion with deliberately non-invasive interventions. The exhibition was conceived as a narrative in which the works served as various chapters to be read in disparate orders, overlapping with those that came from the layering of de Chirico’s experience. It was a peaceful invasion into a sacred territory that is a true “conversation piece.” The last interview the artist gave before he died appears in Playboy and ends like this: “Do you believe in God?” “No, I don’t know.” “But you don’t believe in anything?” “I believe in Giorgio de Chirico, isn’t that enough? Everything else is boring.”
Giorgio de Chirico was born in Greece in 1888. He is known for founding the Scuola Metafisica style of painting, which would be hugely influential to groups like the surrealists.
Luca Lo Pinto is an Italian editor and curator. He is currently the director of Museo MACRO in Rome.
WORDS: LUCA LO PINTO
PHOTOGRAPHY: PIOTR NIEPSUJ
STYLING: FRANCESCA IZZI
CREATIVE DIRECTION: ALESSIO ASCARI
PRODUCTION: CAROLINA DE NICOLÒ
