Luigi Pericle
The rediscovery of a master
A small villa from the 1930s, closed for years and swallowed up by brambles. It guarded an unimaginable secret. The story of a forgotten master. His art. His culture. For fifteen years, Greta and Andrea Biasca-Caroni have watched that house, more and more badly damaged with the passing of time, dreaming of being able to acquire it. Its garden bordered the property of their hotel in Ascona (Canton of Ticino, Switzerland), the Hotel Ascona, on Monte Verità (Hill of Truth). They wanted to visit those rooms, fascinated by the magnetism they emanated and by the memories of a silent man who had lived there intensely. Acquired by auction and reopened after a long period of forgetfulness, the house has revealed an extraordinary heritage. Hundreds of paintings and drawings meticulously kept in large wooden boxes crammed inside the rooms and basement. The high bookshelves still kept, rigorously aligned, volumes of philosophy, literature, art of past civilizations, from Egypt to the Far East, as well as scientific texts of theosophy, anthroposophy, astrology, ufology, which had nourished the knowledge and wisdom of the master, his vast preparation, which he then poured into the paintings and papers as an exercise of meditation, and into thousands of autograph documents, notebooks, drawings, theoretical and narrative texts. Bringing back to life paintings, Indian ink drawings, horoscopes, and manuscripts made it possible to return the figure of a leading author to history of art, and of culture in general; a protagonist of aesthetic research from the second post-war period onwards, whose human and intellectual life suddenly reemerged with all its value and complexity.
Luigi Pericle
LUIGI PERICLE 