Abstract/Summary

“From 1917, when he was fourteen, Raymond Radiguet taught me to distrust the new if it had a new look, to run counter to the fashions of the avant-garde. This puts one in an awkward position. One shocks the right. One shocks the left. But, at a distance, all these contradictions come together under one label. Clever the one that can sort this out. The young people visiting our ruins see nothing but a style. The age called ‘heroic’ displays nothing but its daring. (…) This phenomenon of perspective does not concern youth. Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all other and resemble nothing.”Jean Cocteau The young people visiting our ruins see nothing but a style is an exhibition without a specific theme, which doesn’t follow any historiography precept nor tries to define one.The show is built as a succession of conceptual reflections that, in relation to one another, attempt at imagining a constructive line between artworks differing in influences and origins. Reading this linear development as a simplistic attitude would be a mistake though. It is precisely by erasing all superfluous thematic approaches that the show questions the validity of a freer analysis of the works and of their display. The exhibition applies a perspective method able to balance, compare and overlap the languages of two different and somehow irreconcilable realities: that of the museum and of an independent space. Once removed all unnecessary substrata, what remains are precisely the artists’ practices with their fluid and historically transversal analyses of the conceptual elements defining the work.The absence of any overall structure leaves the artists’ works – both extracted from the GAM’s collection and selected among a group of international artists, most of whom showing in Italy for the first time – bare in their strength to influence the viewer’s intuition of alternative conceptual paths in order to experience parallel artistic histories.