TRIBUTE TO JORIO VIVARELLI

Photos by Aurelio Amendola

Room IV

The Leo-Lev Exhibition Center and Jorio Vivarelli Foundation work in synergy to develop project on artistic and cultural themes. The beginning of the collaboration dates back to February last year, when Prof. Giulio Masotti (the Chair of the member’s general meeting) and Ugo Poli (Board’s Chairman) by Vivarelli Foundation, have visited the Leo-Lev Center and its exhibitions, welcomed by Artistic Director Oreste Ruggiero. 

From this first meeting has emerged the commitments to cooperate between the Vinci’s Center and the pistoiese Foundation, it later consolidated in a second President’s meeting. The common goal is the issues’ search for highlighting the art work by Jorio Vivarelli – artist who like few others combines art and architecture – and that of Carlo Pedretti across his research on Leonardo as Architect, as well as artist as usual understood. 

An artistic-cultural  that has already been strengthened over the years, started by relationship between the Foundation Vivarelli’s ex Director Veronica Ferretti, the photographer Aurelio Amendola and Leo-Lev Art Director. In September 2012, in fact, Oreste Ruggiero was called by the Foundation like architect and designer of “Vivarelli and the Architects of ‘900” show, presented in the exhibition hall of Pistoia’s Municipality. 

The exhibition only intended to focus on the key aspect of Jorio Vivarelli’s work, that is the steady and fruitful relationship between his sculpture and architecture.

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With the new 2021 exhibition program, the Leo-Lev Center meant to pay tribute to Jorio Vivarelli, one of the most important sculptors of the Twentieth century. The pistoiese artist work’s highlight his deep link with sculpture and architecture. Over the course of his artistic career, indeed, he cooperated with international renowned architects which Giovanni Michelucci, Oskar Stonorov, Marcel Breuer and many others, until to an artistic and architecture project designed in parallel with Oreste Ruggiero in 2006, Il Senso degli Opposti.

The internationally famous Pistoia photographer (on display in the near future both at the Leo-Lev Center with Aurelio Amendola & Oreste Ruggiero, Towns & Knots of Leonardo and at the Fondazione Pistoia Musei with Aurelio Amendola. Anthology), has taken two white photographs and black, immortalizing the synthesis of the sculptural project conceived by Vivarelli and Ruggiero in 2006, on the occasion of the competition for “Monument to the Fallen of Nassiriya” in Rome.

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In that year, in fact, the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities – in collaboration with the Lazio Region, the Province and the Municipality of Rome – promoted a competition for the design and construction of a “Monument to the Fallen of Nassiriya”, victims of the attack of 12 November 2003. The work was destined to be built in the Schuster Park, on the Via Ostiense near the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome.

Vivarelli and Ruggiero together designed a work full of symbolic meanings and modeled in spaces and forms capable of evoking and enhancing the value of the sacrifice made in the name of solidarity and peace between peoples. 

“The most beautiful thing Vivarelli could tell me, just as we decided to participate in the competition – says Oreste Ruggiero in the publication Architects without Architecture. Architecture without architects – it was in a perfect Pistoia << It is done, but one does not win >>. Very beautifull! We only participated because we were interested in developing the common idea that wanted to be the new foundation of the encounter between art and architecture. “