The Intuition of Ice Michelangelo Antonioni’s Enchanted Mountains

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Curators José Manuel Mouriño

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Montagne Incantate (The Enchanted Mountains) is a series of paintings and photographic enlargements that the Italian director produced in the late seventies, following a long and successful career in film. Thanks to the generosity of Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea de Ferrara, the Fundación Luis Seoane offers here a selection of 52 pieces out of a total of 160. It is a unique opportunity to learn more about a relatively unkown aspect of the person who many believe represents, along with Jean-Luc Godard, a way of understanding cinema as taking certain aesthetic postulates to their limits by combining the lyrical power of the images with the dialogues. It was for a reason that Roland Barthes said of Antonioni that he possessed a special kind of sensitivity, capable of expressing the spirit of the time, of modernity.

The presence of the Enchanted Mountains at the Fundación Luis Seoane is a unique opportunity for those who already love the work of the Italian artist, and for those who want to immerse themselves for the first time in the cinematic universe of one the last figureheads of the European film avant-garde. What makes these images so unique is not only the fine line that separates Antonioni’s film work from the art world, but also how they were made. The director created them by taking a picture of the original piece or several pieces joined in a collage, and then blowing up the photograph. At a certain point, the filmmaker would deliberately halt the process, when the painted forms sort of looked like mountains, but were not quite entirely recognisable. What moved Antonioni was the timeline between figuration and abstraction, the point where an image loses its identity as a shape or colour, and takes on the appearance of a mountain. It was a game of perception and he was inviting the observer to play.

Artists: Michelangelo Antonioni