Marina Apollonio. Uroboro

The Giancarlo Vitali Museum and the ancient church of San Nicolao host two site-specific installations by the great Italian artist Marina Apollonio, a leading exponent of international optical and kinetic art. Apollonio arrives in Bellano with a new project, designed to alter the perception of the spaces that host her large-scale works, a circular dynamic measuring 4.5 metres in diameter and a perspective ellipse almost two metres high.

The title of the exhibition, curated by Chiara Gatti, Uroboro, reflects the circularity of the artist’s works and links them ideally to the sacred iconography that echoes in the centuries-old history of San Nicolao, its 14th-century frescoes and the liturgical traces of the original convent of the Umiliati. A symbol of the cosmos and eternity since Egyptian times, the ouroboros was the snake that, biting its own tail, formed a magic ring, an allegory of the infinite regeneration of life. A new legend with abstract forms now inhabits the church and engages the public in a sensory journey, in a physical interaction with the image that deceives the senses and, at the same time, activates them.

Always reflecting on the primary form of the circle, Marina Apollonio has explored every structural variation over the years, with the aim of triggering an internal motion that heralds dynamic relationships between the work and its environment. In an era in which neuroscience, studying the sense organs, thoroughly analyses the brain’s ability to interpret the signals that reach it, optical art – as it was “conceived” in the 1960s – returns with extraordinary relevance due to its tendency to test the nervous system, inviting it to navigate between truth and perception.

Exhibition extended until 23rd November.