THE LIVING ARCHIVE OF ANTONIO COLOMBO
Cantàfora Reload and utopia
Columbus rationalist
edited by Ivan Quaroni
Colombo's Gallery - Milan , April 2-30, 2025
On the occasion of the Milan Art Week and Design Week,
Antonio Colombo's gallery explores the relationship
with the Milanese artist Arduino Cantàfora transforming
radically the installations of the previous exhibition,
Anamnesis, in a new exhibition, entitled
Cantàfora Reload and the rationalist utopia of Columbus,
dedicated to the comparison between the modern language of furnishings
Rationalist works produced in the 1930s, under the Columbus brand, by the AL Colombo company of Milan, and the postmodern and citationist grammar of Cantàfora painting. The only exception is the entrance hall of the exhibition, which has remained unchanged, where two large-scale historical works can be seen together for the first time: La città banale (1980) and Stanza di Città – Roma (1983), exhibited respectively at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 1984 Venice Art Biennale.
The idea for this exhibition, renewed in concept and content, stems from the curious intertwined destinies of Arduino Cantàfora and Antonio Colombo. The painter's father, Alfonso Cantàfora, was, in fact, the technical director for many years of the company founded by Milanese industrialist Angelo Luigi Colombo, the father of the gallery owner, who then continued the business until 2023. On the one hand, the artist grew up observing Columbus furniture, constructed from seamless steel tubes, cold-drawn and curved, and then chromed—perfect examples of a rational and futuristic conception of interior design; on the other, Antonio Colombo witnessed the birth and growth of Arduino Cantàfora's pictorial talent, following its developments and evolutions over time and eventually becoming his gallery owner.
Cantàfora Reload and the Rationalist Utopia of Columbus is, therefore, an exhibition that begins with the biographical events of the two protagonists, to initiate a comparison between two seemingly opposing aesthetic concepts—Modernism and Postmodernism—which find a meeting point in the subtle web of analogies and correspondences that link Cantàfora's painting to the rigorous design of Columbus furniture.
Among the Columbus furniture produced in the 1930s, several items of great historical value have been selected for this exhibition, such as the round table and cantilever chair first exhibited in 1933 at the Futurist Pavilion of the 5th Triennale of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the first held in Milan in the building designed by Giovanni Muzio. The objects produced by the AL Colombo company, with their ultramodern design, were part of the furnishings of the waiting room of a civil airport station designed by Enrico Prampolini and built in Parco Sempione.
Also of great importance is the cantilevered stool exhibited, again at the 5th Triennale, inside the House on the Lake for the artist, designed by the Group of Architects and Engineers of Como, leading representatives of Larian Rationalism. Also on display is the prototype of an armchair by Pietro Bottoni, exhibited in the waiting room for a doctor at the 6th Triennale in 1936. It is a "Great Rest Armchair" with an innovative elastic cross-frame suspension.
In Cantàfora's painting, the precision and rationality that distinguish Columbus's productions are found in the way in which architectural and urban visions obey the rigor of descriptive geometry, between perspective glimpses and axonometric projections that the artist immerses in the lyricism of memories.
The new works on display in this exhibition are, in fact, recent rereadings and reinterpretations of iconographies painted by Cantàfora between the 1970s and 1980s. They are almost D'apres in the manner of the self-quoting Giorgio de Chirico, reminiscences that the artist inscribes in abstract backgrounds with a vaguely Neoplastic flavor, almost as if they were framed images, snapshots of a future anterior or, better yet, hypotheses of a past continually updated in the form of imposing urban elevations and monumental architectural interiors, punctuated by precise chiaroscuro.
Also on display will be parallel perspectives with enigmatic titles, taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest,
which will become a source of inspiration for the paragraphs of the stories contained in the volume published by Einaudi in 1988
“Fifteen rooms for a house.”
