“Il convito della bellezza” (The Banquet of Beauty) is the name of an important anthological exhibition currently being held in Milan, in the lovely venue of the Rotonda di San Carlo al Corso.

The exhibit, which is completed by a magnificent monograph published by Scheiwiller, is dedicated to one of today’s most significant Italian artists, Lis Magni Fasiani. This is an exhibition of great breadth in the current production of art and culture in Italy, developed in the “Corsia dei Servi”, which was lighted by the presence of the poet Davide Maria Turoldo. Magni Fasiani is an artist who has sought her path in painting and in sculpture, but she has been active in writing and poetry as well, and distinguished critics and writers, Carlo Bo for one, have drawn attention to her works.
Lis Magni Fasiani’s artistic development crosses the twentieth century, from the 1930s to present, and is founded on a harmonious combination of arts, considering that painting and sculpturing have meant, for her, substantiating art with poetry, presenting and unveiling, with this exhibition, the visible and the invisible. Magni Fasiani has experimented with various techniques (at the age of twelve, in Turin, she modelled a Saint Francis), for example little pictures done “en pleine aire” with a palette knife. Hers are accurate views of hills and mountains, harking back to local culture as it was in the nineteenth-century, with special reference to Piedmontese artists like Fontanesi, Reycendo, Avendo and Delleani, through a vocation for landscapes based on a luministic research.
After the war she moved to Milan and grew impassioned with pastels, creating worlds full of trees, dragonflies, butterflies, cats and owls. Portrait painting has always appealed to her, and if we consider the best of her portraits, done in the years of her maturity (her father sitting and reading, or the portrait of a young girl), it cannot be denied that this eminent painter – who strongly recalls Lalla Romano – has achieved formal mastery.
Historical events, of our times and hers, have interested her as well – such as the changes that society underwent when people began to leave the countryside and move into the cities, a migration that in our country peaked between the Sixties and Seventies. Her interest converges and focuses on issues regarding the technological society and on cities, already portrayed in painting and in cinema by Sironi and by bright film-directors, with extraordinary clarity, concision and concentration, capable of defining a perceptible and visible poetry of space, in which reality experiences both stability and estrangement, and above all with a superb ability in framing her subjects and creating lights and hues that stand out for limpidity.
Each work has its own internal dynamics, be it the scene of a city or a city in the scene, in the sense that Lis Magni Fasiani’s modern architectures stress the need to preserve and save the environment, anticipating current environmental policies, but also the necessity for it to be reinvented every day. In her paintings, light seems to mount on the stage, especially in her works depicting urban scenes; Kaisserlian saw it as light sheathing the structural fabric, De Grada spoke of an auroral sense and of western Zen, Munari mentioned prismatic surfaces grappling with volumetric structures. Light becomes a inner flame that flickers in the heart of things, and that comes out gently, softly, dim and discreet. The synthesis of forms, that somehow recalls post-cubism and that Fasiani inaccurately labelled romantic cubism, although clearly showing her mark through the colours, lightened by careful chromatic decorations, still resists among the tones and semitones, within a nacreous matter, finally emerging as a fairyland-scape, where the substance of objects turns into a sky that has no limits. It is the same mark of finiteness and of infinity that, romanticised, can be found in her sculptures, to which the artist devoted her budding artistic career first at the Ariete Gallery and then at La Bussola in Turin, where she was introduced in 1953 by her prominent colleague Luigi Carluccio.
One of her verses reads “the sky crystallizes geometrically”, in the sense of an image in which a sign marks the boundary of form and of the particles that make up its space. Her images, like every image, become a network of meanings: thematic, symbolic and psychological. She takes care to focalize the image, to freeze it in a state of eclectic tension that is exalted by a centre of action, in the very breath or theatre of human truth that on the paths of memory evokes the relation between space-light and colour. Her precious contributions to sculpture, and the testimony given by the awards she has been attributed, place her in a position of respect in Italian painting, and her own painting, tinged with romanticism, has developed into a new avant-garde, made of offerings, dreams and imagery, the same that influenced the great French poets of the nineteenth century.
Traslated by Interpres