IULM professor Vincenzo Trione wins the Viareggio-Rèpaci 2024 Award

Prologo celeste. Nell'atelier di Anselm Kiefer (Einaudi, 2023) by Vincenzo Trione, IULM professor of History of Contemporary Art and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Fashion and Tourism, won the 2024 edition of the prestigious Viareggio-Rèpaci Literary Prize in the non-fiction section.

'Compared to works of art,' Trione writes in Prologo celeste, 'ateliers hold the same value that prologues hold for books or portals hold for cathedrals.' Indeed, the volume delves into the enormous spaces of the atelier-workshops that the German artist "created" in France: at La Ribaute in Barjac, on the slopes of the Cevennes, and north of Paris, in the small town of Croissy-Beaubourg. These are spaces - documented by the rich iconographic apparatus in the volume - between the construction site and the workshop: 'They are two places,' Trione explains in an interview with Exibart, 'that support each other, but are radically different. In the case of Barjac we are faced with a kind of great total work of art. Kiefer retrieves objects, intervenes directly within this expanse, transforming the landscape. In the case of Croissy we are faced with a space in which Kiefer takes the freedom to experiment, to invent, to correct, to erase. It is the place where he marks his distance from the art system and the market. Here the works are presented in their processual phase: the work as a process, not as a finished object destined for a gallery, a museum, a foundation or a private home."

In his book, Trione intersects myth and the artist, identified in three different figures: Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give it to mankind; Hephaestus, divine blacksmith and god of fire; and Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder to the top of a mountain and then retrieve it from the valley and resume climbing for eternity. And as Albert Camus writes in his The Myth of Sisyphus . An Essay on the Absurd (1942) 'The work of art arises from the renunciation of intelligence to ponder on what is concrete. And like an alchemist Kiefer celebrates in his works what in fact Trione calls 'realism of difference.'

Professor Trione is to be congratulated on this important recognition by the entire IULM community.

Photography:Les Femmes de la Révolution (Women of the Revolution), installation of 14 beds of steel, lead, water, and a photograph on lead and mixed media, 2006.
Eschaton Kunststiftung, La Ribaute, Barjac. (Photo by Charles Duprat). © Anselm Kiefer.