We interviewed Massimo Belli. Based in Rome, he writes critical texts for art galleries such as Niccoli and Operativa. He is the project manager of Hypermaremma, the contemporary art festival in Tuscany. He has become the Artistic Director of the Associazione per l’Arte e Più which we will discuss in an upcoming interview.
Curator or art historian
How did your curatorial journey begin?
In reality, I believe that in recent years there has been confusion regarding the term “curare.” I am, first and foremost, a historian of contemporary art specialized in Italian and international art entre deux guerres and of the second half of the 20th century. These are the tools with which I begin to operate, the lenses through which I observe art. On top of this theoretical foundation, I have built up the research and practice of the gallery, which follows very different logics from university studies.
The first experience of Massimo Belli with an art gallery
What was your first experience with an art gallery?
The first opportunity I had was with the Galleria d’Arte Niccoli di Parma, which “bet” on me even before I finished my studies, helping me in obtaining all the documents useful for telling the biography of Conrad Marca-Relli, a key artist of American Abstract Expressionism. From this generosity, a collaboration was born that continues to this day. Working from the start with a reality with over fifty years of history changed my vision and approach to both historicized and non-historicized contemporary art. It allowed me to learn how to “ground” an exhibition project, how to find the works, and how to conduct research and archiving at certain levels. Having the opportunity to travel, meet industry players, and speak a certain “jargon” of this world is like studying again, because you have to learn a previously unknown grammar. My fortune was to learn in the field without, however, losing the way home: the Niccoli universe thrives on the harmony that Roberto and Marco have created over the years, with one capable of safeguarding and managing the archive and warehouse that are the backbone of the Gallery and the other at the forefront to generate new opportunities and open frontiers. Being able to learn from both made me understand the importance of knowing where you come from to decide where to go.
The Galleria Mattia De Luca
With which other galleries have you collaborated or are you collaborating?
At the same time, I had the opportunity to experience up close what I have always studied and admired only in books, collaborating with the Galleria Mattia De Luca for wonderful exhibitions like those of Marca-Relli and Morandi. I owe a lot to this experience because it has accustomed me to keep the bar high, to think big like Mattia does. This path of “practice recovery” has had a strong acceleration in the last year, with involvement in the activities of Operativa Arte Contemporanea di Carlo Pratis, with whom I also share all the logistical realization of Hypermaremma.
Operativa Contemporary Art
What is your current relationship with Operativa Arte Contemporanea?
With Carlo, I believe I have made a great leap forward in terms of “militancy” in the contemporary, because – also due to the fact that at the base of our relationship there is above all a solid friendship – it gives me the opportunity to work on all phases of the process, both in terms of the creative and design contribution and regarding everything that accompanies and follows an exhibition event. With him, I have the opportunity to work on every corner of the gallery process: from getting to know, “discovering” or “re-discovering” an artist and their work, following their production, the conception of an exhibition, communication to the public, up to the final outputs like printing or collecting. This dimension of knowledge and adventure that distinguishes the work that Operativa carries out in the second but, above all, in the first market is a fundamental step to overcome the narrative gap that distinguishes a “curator” of texts from a “curator” of exhibitions.
As a contemporary art historian, therefore an interpreter of something in progress, I firmly believe in a working dimension of lifelong learning, according to which every junction of what I do constitutes a piece to do better what I will do.
The adventure of Massimo Belli with Hypermaremma
What is the Hypermaremma festival for you?
Hypermaremma is my present. I knew the festival from its beginnings thanks to the synergy that existed on various projects with the Galleria Niccoli. A couple of editions ago, in 2022, Carlo Pratis invited me to follow the installation of the gigantic corten work I Giocolieri dell’Armonia by Giuseppe Gallo. Despite the fact that I have great admiration for the artist and his work, and the opportunity I later had to get to know him better and understand the depth of his research, that occasion made me realize that the next testing ground for my training could be logistics on an environmental scale, on a public level, in direct synergy with the artists.
After that, did your involvement in the festival become a staple?
From that moment, I have followed the festival journalistically – through a series of interviews with the participating artists – often going to the inspections, the setups, the openings. The following edition, in 2023, I was invited to curate in collaboration with them the installation of Felice Levini Dal Giorno alla Notte, at the Parco Archeologico di Cosa, in Ansedonia. On that occasion, I realized that I was not so far from being able to direct the logistics of an environmental installation.
So you became the Project manager of the festival?
Exactly, from the VI edition (2024), I hold the role of Project manager. Thanks to the trust placed in me not only by Carlo but also by Matteo D’Aloja and Giorgio Galotti, all three co-founder of Hypermaremma. Engaging in a dimension of public art is very stimulating, the festival has been promoting for seven editions a dialogue between territory and contemporary art capable of re-activating the local culture in a disruptive way, involving the Maremma community at all levels: from sourcing materials to production, up to installation and participation as a user. This cycle, sustainable at all levels, generates a plusvalore al territorio which, in turn, enhances the works of the invited artists, encouraged to establish a relationship of harmony and exchange with the local history, culture, and geography.
Do the works become permanent installations?
Every year, an attempt is made to settle a tangible trace of these moments of art, leaving the territory with permanent works that can emphasize the importance of these places and create new points of reference. I think of, above all, the wonderful neon by Massimo UbertiSpazio Amato at the WWF Oasis of Lake Burano in the Terre di Sacra area, I Giocolieri dell’Armonia by Giuseppe Gallo at the Tagliata delle Dune, the Fontanile by Giuseppe Ducrot at Macchiatonda, Prospettiva Cielo by Mauro Staccioli but also Left & Right by Claire Fontaine at the Fattoria Stendardi or Venus Anadyomene by Emiliano Maggi at the Azienda Agricola Terenzi. This sedimentation quickly points towards a less bourgeois model of museum, that of the widespread museum – or ecomuseum –, capable of creating an attraction not for magnificence or for the encyclopedic nature of the vision, but for the ability to narrate and pass on a story and a tradition through products of creativity and aesthetics that are contemporary in the way they communicate.
Curation and art criticism
How is your work as a curator and critic for the galleries structured?
In my work, it is impossible to disregard human relationships. Today, I continue to follow the curatorial part of the text for many of the initiatives of the Galleria d’Arte Niccoli, not least the beautiful exhibition by Sergio Ragalzi Tutte le nostre scimmie, but also the texts for art fairs or biographical panels for exhibitions and other display occasions. By now, I am very attached to the artists with whom the gallery collaborates, from Artan Shalsi to CCH, from Jessica Wilson to Nicus Lucà, from Piero Fogliati to Pablo Candiloro, from Alessandro Brighetti to Sergio Ragalzi indeed. I have written a lot about them and for them. Felice Levini, for example, was one of the first assignments I received from the Galleria Niccoli when, on the occasion of an edition of Flashback, I wrote the biographical panels. From there, a relationship was born that has intertwined several times up to the exhibition that is now in Pavilion 9B of the Mattatoio.
The Artists of Operativa and the writing of critical texts
Which are the artists for whom you have developed a critical text?
The same applies to the artists who gravitate in the orbit of Operativa Arte Contemporanea, for whom I always try to create texts and writings that can tell something more than what is seen in the exhibition.
With many other artists, I have conducted interviews and/or written small reflections that have then been used, published, or have become critical texts; I think of Giuseppe Gallo, Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Ducrot, Maurizio Nannucci, Massimo Uberti, Davide Rivalta, Emiliano Maggi, Marco Emmanuele, Guglielmo Maggini, Giulia Mangoni, Tommaso Spazzini Villa, Marcela Calderon Andrade, and many others that I am now forgetting and for whom I will make amends when I realize it.
Massimo Belli’s opinion on the art market
What do you think of the art market?
The art market, I believe, suffers from imbalances from various points of view, primarily on the economic level: it is a market characterized by extreme volatility in some segments and great solidity in others, but it can only be the last link in a series of other markets that reflect the same imbalances. For this reason, it lives by a reflected light that often manifests itself with significant crises like the current one, burdened with all the problems that derive from other sectors. There is also a problem of negative narrative, which casts a shadow on the historical relevance that the market has had and still has – as well as the work of art galleries – in the production of artists. It still seems sacrilegious to imagine the great masterpieces of history connected to a system of economic necessities when, in fact, they are completely enveloped by it. Without the great investors, without the economic movements and the consequences that derive from them, the entire artistic and cultural heritage would be decimated.
Where does this impasse originate?
It is born already in the Università and in the Accademie, which think of “staining” the aura of culture whenever the commodifying component of work emerges. I consider this a wrong interpretation, which omits fundamental passages in the history of the image. The market keeps the work of artists alive: taking “samples” of this narrative, we need only imagine that today we would not know the work of Jackson Pollock if it had not been economically supported by Alfonso Ossorio at the beginning of his career and, going backwards, we could not admire some of the masterpieces of Guido Reni without the sudden price changes that the artist practiced with the tacit consent of the Barberini to the detriment of other prestigious commissions, such as those of the Spanish nobility.
To cut to the chase, I have no difficulty saying that the market is art, and vice versa.
Are there any artists you would suggest a collector to buy?
There are artists that I would suggest buying to a speculator, but a collector, I believe, has the freedom to purchase according to their own taste and guided by what Roland Barthes would call the punctum, that which in an image evokes a wound in you. Then it depends on what each of us means by “suggestion”: those who invest in art over long periods certainly look for artists with solid galleries behind them, with controlled productions, monitoring of the works and the collectors who purchase them; those who live off the market, on the other hand, need to interpret and sometimes create a demand, thus living off moments, the right artists taken at the right time in an attempt to anticipate a desire and a taste of the public; the collector in the strictest sense of the term seeks, instead, a light within the work capable of convincing them to spend a sum to possess that micro-fraction of beauty that is the work of art. I don’t want to circle around the question, but I truly believe that there are infinite specificities of collecting.
You yourself, however, are a collector…
I would be tremendously hypocritical if I told you that I recommend collecting the artists I work with, but certainly my idea of collecting coincides with my working orthodoxy; therefore, if I take on the assignment with an artist, I certainly have respect for them and appreciate their work, which is why I would consider it right to collect them. If I raise my head while answering this question of yours, I see the first work I ever purchased, a small project for a floor made by Felice Levini at the end of the Nineties.
To the speculators, I wouldn’t know what to say, but I am certain that history always makes folds under which it hides important passages.
Analog art and digital art
How do you see digital art?
To answer this question, I am forced to start a little further back, first asking myself what art is. Admitting that there is no answer – or at least that there is no single answer –, the most plausible assertion in my eyes is that art is a great abacus full of questions. By focusing within history, the artist uses creativity to generate, more or less voluntarily, questions useful for illuminating some blind spots of what we are. This ability to bring out questions manifests itself through images or non-images that follow the rules of all other languages and, in general, of communication.
So what do you think about digital art and artworks related to the Metaverse?
I believe that in the digital realm and, even more specifically, in the Metaverse, the proliferation and translation of art forms was inevitable. Just as the need to establish an aesthetic communicative model led a proto-human to fix the image of some beasts on the walls of the Caves of Lascaux, in the same way, the digital world and the Metaverse felt the urgency to equip themselves with an aesthetic form of exchange, as a primordial, social impulse and, not least, as a reflection of the structures of power manifestation belonging to the real world. Just as the last two decades have made many of our desires ethereal, shifting them increasingly from the physicality of objects to dematerialization, so art has initiated a new concretization in a non-physical world where the equivalent of the object is represented by a code. For this reason, I believe that this “New World” contains in nuce the same potential as the “Old World” in terms of artistic creation, provided that the same needs that have guided human expression in our universe can proliferate there.
She has collaborated for many years with art magazines such as Artribune, XIBT Contemporary, ArtApp, Insideart and Espoarte, preferring contemporary art in its many facets and media drifts.
