Works from the Masetti Family Collection
22 June – 22 September 2006
Inauguration: THURSDAY 22 JUNE 2006 from 9 pm to midnight
On the occasion of July in Empoli, the association’s exhibition spaces inaugurated last March
open to welcome an exhibition homage to Luigi Boni, almost thirty years after his death,
Empoli artist who lived a few years of his youth in Alexandria in Egypt and who has
stayed in Paris in the mid-thirties, returning to Empoli, where he was born in 1904,
during the 1950s. However, he continued his travels, alternating periods in which he has
lived in Milan, where he met the research itineraries of Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani,
Agostino Bonalumi. In contact with the Florentine and Tuscan artistic experiences, while in
territory of origin he had befriended Loris Fucini and Piero Gambassi, he had approached the
first half of the sixties in the entourage of the Galleria Numero in Florence, animated and directed by
Fiamma Vigo, which presented in that period, the innovative creative paths oriented towards
abstraction and the informal, participating in a series of exhibitions that this gallery offered in various
Italian cities, and at exhibitions held in public and private spaces, such as the Florentine gallery itself
Proposals or Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, or the Viani Foundation in Viareggio.
“Gifted and intelligent artist, open to international contemporary artistic events, of which he has
able to grasp the most significant emergencies, which he investigated and experienced with great vitality
and with very personal contributions, she still represents, for his country, several years after his own
death, a spearhead “- the now well-known art critic and historian Lara Vinca writes of him
Masini. From the series of “scales”, works in which they are arranged on the surface, in succession
rhythmic, irregular lamellae, paper or wooden, which cause a sort of emergence on a dense scale,
unified by the often monochromatic material, to that of the “lavaroni”, spherical concretions of vegetables
marine that he threw and fixed in quantity on the support, in guided aggregations on the jute cloth,
covering the surface with intense colors such as “Klein blue”, the color with which Yves Klein impregnated them
his “sponges”, up to the series of “toothpicks”, poor materials through which he elaborated his own
research on space, Boni with his “atomic combinations” crosses in his artistic itinerary
the experiments of the Informal, Spatialism and Arte Povera according to a personal one
rethinking with singular examples, projecting oneself towards the contemplation of the universe and the
conception of being with a quick and immediate “doing”.
Almost thirty years after his death, Alberto Moretti, Fabio Cresci, Marco Bagnoli, Remo
Salvadori, who participated in the first exhibition of the Sincresis association, remember him with
pleasure. Thus the works of him preserved by the Masetti family, which he is not, are brought to light
the only one to possess works by the artist in our territory, but who has expressed the will of
re-evaluate the figure of Boni by offering the public a series of creations that have remained for years in a
warehouse – workshop where the artist worked during the seventies.
It is not a question of an all-encompassing exposition, but of an initial path that may involve a
short term a general survey of Boni’s creative itinerary, a unitary cataloging
of his work by him and a complete retrospective of his work, arousing the interest of public bodies and
private.
Information: Tel and Fax. 0571/73619 e-mail to. scappini@virgilio.it
Hours: June, July, August: Tuesday and Thursday 9.00pm – 11.00pm; Wednesday and Friday 6.30 pm –
20.00. Saturday by appointment. September: Wednesday to Saturday from 5pm to 7.30pm.
How to get there: Car: Fi – Pi- Li S. G. C. Empoli west exit; FS: Fi – Yes; Fi – Pi: Empoli stop
