Caffè Florian, 'Lunettes'
"Lunettes", round eyeglasses like imaginary moons, spectacles turned into instruments through which to look at the world in a different way: with his installation, Mauro Bonaventura half-jokingly, half-seriously guides us into the world of his art, made of daily hard work and power to the imagination.
Trying to understand the reality that surrounds us through these spectacles of his, these small colourful mirrors, these rainbow windows opening onto Piazza San Marco, almost seems a gamble. Mauro Bonaventura has strewn the Florian with pills of imagination in the form of glass lenses meant to make us smile but also give serious consideration to the art-glass binomial.
The glasses worn by Elton John or John Lennon have become huge, and, like in "Yellow Submarine", they are the means to start us on a psychedelic trip through the rooms of the Florian. This neo-pop installation looks easy to interpret, but is instead a complex and articulated work, and especially complex and articulated in the technical difficulties involved and in its painstaking preparation.
"Lunettes", the exaggerated eyeglasses of this Venetian artist, would surely have met with Peggy Guggenheim’s approval, and are evidence of a creative artist who has chosen glass, a complex medium, to express himself. Making art today using glass is more and more difficult and I believe that Bonaventura has won his challenge.
Looking at the big eyeglasses, composed of dozens small lamp-worked lenses, almost like the eyes of a curious chameleon, I am reminded of what Wystan Hugh Auden wrote: “It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ”. Mauro Bonaventura continues along the experimental path the Florian has been pursuing in the field of Visual Arts, and surely these "Lunettes" help us feel incurably younger.
Let’s then take advantage of this blessed state and make time to pause and ponder on art and, à propos of glasses, let’s not follow the White Rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland" in obsessively saying: "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”
Stefano Stipitivich.
