NAPLES.- GOAL! is a collective of ten Neapolitan artists of different generations who, through different languages ​​and paths, have been invited, on the occasion of the victory of the Napoli team in the Serie A championship, to give their own reading of the action of the goal, celebrating the fate of the team and the involvement of the city in the occasion of the event at the Fondazione Morra Greco.

From painting to drawing, from photography to installations, the works on display on the third floor of the Morra Greco Foundation trace a path of practices and research which together provide an intergenerational panorama of the work of some Neapolitan and Campanian artists.

There are two aspects of the goal that I think are interesting. One is the coefficient of unpredictability out of any calculation that cooperates in its realization. The other instead is the spontaneous, immediate, equally unpredictable, positive or negative reaction that follows it: the exultation, the scream, the same and opposite snap of whoever shoots it of whoever looks at it or whoever suffers the goal. The unexpected release of an instinct.

The idea of ​​the exhibition was born from the desire to celebrate the championship victory of Napoli. Ten artists of different generations, united by a punctual bond from birth or a lasting one with the city, through different practices, languages ​​and approaches to research, participate in this exhibition by telling their idea of ​​goal, their contextualization of the winning action and their reading of the meaning or of the circumstances, immediate or distant, that surround it. A goal that is no longer pure ballistic mechanics of the shot or the ball, but in life as in art.

The invitation to participate in the exhibition is accompanied by the goals of the Napoli team, the celebrations of the fans, the continuous unpredictability of the results (the party has been postponed), and the return flights of those who were out and wanted to be here on the day of the party (which will take place).

And yet, this exhibition is not an exhibition on football, it is not an exhibition on Naples, or an exhibition that intends to tell, reducing it, some form of identity. It is an exhibition of works of art that perform (thematically or not) the goal in its English meaning, of the objective, straight and directed towards one point: honest and spontaneous execution. The perfect alchemy of a ping-pong, a dribble, a net. The space in which the exhibition tries to move therefore goes beyond attempts at universality and reductionism – identitarian or artistic. Trying instead to offer an overview of works thought impromptu, free as a celebration, like a GOAL!.

This attempt is borrowed and motivated, like a recording or a photograph that captures some fragments, but does not exhaust its controversial complexities, by the celebration of the present moment. The works, expressly conceived for the exhibition, presented for the first time or ad hoc adapted for this occasion, are the result of an unpredictable and extemporaneous exchange and dialogue with the artists. And in a small way, all of them try to restore a fragment but not the totality of the operating method, the processes and the poetics of the artists invited to take part in GOAL!.

The work of Betty Bee (Naples, 1963), Network (2023), is the painting of a terraqueous globe that the artist observes from a hidden point in the Universe thus having the vision of the planet wrapped in the weft of a net punctured by the flight of an airplane which, passing through it, widens and modifies its mesh. The net, with a dividing but also protective value, distances the work from reality and functions as an entrance into another dimension: the purified one of art and the imaginative transfiguration of pictorial colour.

Carmela De Falco 's (Avellino, 1994) installation , Imprevisto (2023), uses a football net focusing on the rhythmic carving of its texture. By interrupting this mathematical succession, the small brass element that makes up the work inserts an element of sudden dystonia, an unexpected deviation, within an inalienable order. The installation by Giulio Delvè (Naples, 1984), Somehead (2018), site-specific readapted for GOAL! ,




sees lined up a group of heads who stand out in space like an assault team: between the Mohicans and punks, a group of young actors who make up the imagination of a generation that grew up among the post-industrial waste of the suburbs, the transformation of cities, and social centres.

Magic Shows Are Organized (2022) is a lithograph by Piero Golia (Naples, 1974) created as part of the Laboratorio Piramide residency project at the historic Litografia Bulla in Rome. Summarizing the correlation between conceptual, mechanical-executive data, and randomness, the work summarizes the "magical" character inherent in Piero Golia's poetics.

The poignant work of a formidable artist from Campania (2023) is the title of the installation by Marco Pio Mucci (Benevento, 1990) composed of a polyptych of drawings on paper and the frame of a scooter found on the streets of Naples which evokes the lost adolescence of the artist among the rough roads of Campania and one of the media icons of this football season.

The work of Giulia Piscitelli (Naples, 1965), Mr. Z , is a set of six unpublished polaroids from the artist's private archive connected to the Mr. Z project (2008), presented at the Furla Prize 2009, centered on the theme of freedom and identity through the objects of a Fedayn.

Campione (2023) is the self-portrait in oil by Nicola Vincenzo Piscopo (Naples, 1990). The artist, portrayed as a figurine of a Napoli footballer, represents himself as the champion that every football-loving father in Naples in those years would have wanted, immortalizing, ironically, the unfulfilled expectations of an entire generation.

The sculpture by Vincenzo Rusciano (Naples, 1973), In the Magic Rectangle (2023) opens into space like a portal that collects visions and material suggestions found. The composition of waste elements, which recombine in a new magnetic field of equilibrium, draws a geometry of bodies suspended in space inside and outside a magical rectangle.

The series of paintings created by Antonio Serrapica (Castellammare di Stabia, 1960) declines the theme of the goal by crossing the artist's pictorial imagery which portrays a transfigured world, in which daily and social conflicts are sublimated in a sarcastic smile on nature, landscape and society.

The installation by the Vedovamazzei duo , born in 1991 from the collaboration of Stella Scala (1964) and Simeone Crispino (1962), Napoli da Morra Greco (2023), created expressly for GOAL! and tailored to the history of the president of the Foundation, Maurizio Morra Greco, represents the walking route from the Maradona stadium to the Ascarelli stadium in Ponticelli in via Argine which tells the story of the collector's biographical and family connection with football.

Text edited by Giulia Pollicita

The exhibition project is financed with the resources of the POC Campania FESR 2014/2020, Strategic Plan for Culture and Cultural Heritage Programming 2021 Global Forum - Contemporary art exhibitions EDI 2021.

Morra Greco Foundation
GOAL!
June 8th, 2023 - ongoing