Video interview: Valentina Salcedo
On the occasion of the centenary of its foundation, the University of Trieste inaugurates the exhibition “My pupoli: Gaetano Kanizsa scientist and artist”, a tribute to the scholar and to the artistic and documentary heritage of the university and the territory. From 1953 to 1983 Gaetano Kanizsa was, in fact, a professor at the University of Trieste where he founded the Institute of Psychology.
The permanent exhibition, curated by professors Paolo Bernardis, Carlo Fantoni and Walter Gerbino of the University’s Department of Life Sciences, is open to the public on the second floor of building A in Piazzale Europa 1, from Monday to Friday, from 9.00 am at 18.00.
The exhibition anticipates the rich calendar of events organized for the centenary of the University of Trieste which will come alive in the autumn.
There are over thirty works on display, including scientific and artistic ones, in the original version or through reproductions, to discover the world of the pùpoli, the unique visual entities of their kind to which Kanizsa has dedicated a large part of his artistic life.
Through strokes of a brush soaked in black ink and without any predetermined structure, Kanizsa traced some initial signs on the canvas: only later, looked at from afar, with a “new eye”, did he enrich them with others. This is how the pùpolo was formed (in the Triestine dialect “draw”, “scrabble”). Through these visual suggestions Kanizsa has explored the rules of human perception, questioning the complex relationship between artist and observer. Painting, born above all as a game, was able to influence the entire scientific activity of the scholar who created over 250 paintings between the 1960s and 1993.
On the other hand, there are eight thematic stations within the exhibition, each set up with one or more scientific works deliberately juxtaposed with the corresponding artistic transposition to bear witness to the link between the scientist and the painter: the idea of order, so dear to Kanizsa.
Among the most famous exhibited works, the original version of the “Triangle of Kanizsa”, an illusory object, an example of a figure that owes its existence to the productive capacities of the visual system.
