On May 27 the exhibition The Last Great Battle – from the Baroque of Salvator Rosa to the contemporary of Max Coppeta, curated by Alessandro Demma, opens at the Baccaro Art Gallery (Pagani, Salerno).
The project, from an idea of Davide Caramagna (president of the Cultural Association MM18), opens a cycle of exhibitions that have the aim of putting the art of Max Coppeta in dialogue with some masterpieces of the most famous Neapolitan Baroque artists ( F. Guarini, F. Solimena, L. Giordano, M. Pino da Siena, S. Rosa, to name a few) from the De Chiara De Maio Foundation, with the exceptional critical contribution of the art historian Sandro Barbagallo (curator of the Historical Collections Department of the Vatican Museums).
In this first exhibition, everything revolves around the work The Battle between Christians and Turks by Salvator Rosa from 1630, commissioned by the Baccaro Gallery to celebrate its twenty years of research and granted thanks to the vision and generosity of President Diodato De Maio – De Chiara De Maio Foundation.
The naval battle that took place on 7 October 1571 in the waters of Lepanto marked an epochal turning point in the history of the Mediterranean Sea and of all those countries which, until then, had been involved in the struggle to stem the Turkish threat.
The battle, a theme dear to Salvator Rosa’s pictorial activity, was one of his favorite subjects from the very beginning. Coppeta perceiving the will of the master, to go beyond the visual wonder, chooses to act directly in the third dimension, deforming reflective materials and underlining the decisive role that tensions play in this dialogue.
To help us in this process of decoding a language that had its exploit in the Neapolitan seventeenth century, is the research “Riflessi e Deformi” by the artist Max Coppeta, works that explore the properties of water and liquids to magnify objects immersed in it due to the difference in the refractive index. 
This investigation is a metaphor for the perception of reality, often distorted by the hunger for oppression. The light that, in The Battle of Lepanto, pierces the faces of the protagonists of the two antagonist groups is reinterpreted in a contemporary key by the artist, who assimilates it, to reflect it in his sculptures.
As in a scenography, the observer is enveloped and captured by the attractive force that animates the works of Rosa and Coppeta. This force seems to come out of the figures to propagate itself in the references of a story that shakes the present and returns to being a new form.
This chiaroscuro condition, of man against man, casts new shadows on contemporaneity. But if every battle leaves a crack, the invitation is to grasp its light.
The Last Great Battle : from the Baroque of Salvator Rosa to the contemporary of Max Coppeta – Exhibit
May 27th 2021 at 6PM at Baccaro Art Gallery via Carmine, 66 Pagani – Salerno.
* Entrance upon reservation (+39) 392.6931259 / (+39) 081 5150877.
Exhibit light design by Ciro Ruggiero / Spark.
Set up by Tiziana Cannavacciuolo.
The event is supported by the moral patronage of the Sipbc, Gutenberg Publisher catalog.
