Historical and critical recognition of undervalued artists

An emblematic case: Marco Carnà

Artists outside the system. In the art system the cultural value of a work does not coincide with its visibility in the market or in official history. Commercial dynamics, shifts in critical fashion, or the personal choices of artists can interrupt the continuity between artistic research and public recognition. When this interruption lasts decades, the heritage does not disappear but becomes invisible: the works exist, the research continues, but no institutional system registers them. Marco Carnà (1929–2021) is a documented case of this condition in Italy. Present in the Milanese system of the 1960s alongside Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, Carnà exhibits at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan, the Galleria Falsetti in Prato and the De Beaune in Paris. Every exhibition sells its entire production at the opening. In 1964 he participates in the Quartiere delle Botteghe in Sesto San Giovanni, a collective experiment documented by the press of the time as an attempt to build an artistic community within an industrial centre. He is at the centre of the system. At the end of the 1960s he enters into conflict with the expectations of galleries and critics, who ask him to repeat already established formulas. He refuses. He leaves Sesto San Giovanni at the beginning of 1967, breaks off relations with the market and withdraws to Carnate, the place from which he took his artistic name. He continues to work for more than fifty years, producing thousands of works, complete graphic cycles, public and religious commissions, choosing not to re-enter the circuit of the market or institutional criticism.
When he dies in 2021, he leaves a studio with a body of work that covers without interruption the post-war period through to the last years of his life. The research is documented, the works exist, but no institutional system registers their existence.

The historical reconstruction. When Daniela Piazza, wife of Marco Carnà, seeks out Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio after the death of the artist, it is a matter of historical responsibility: who knows Carnà’s work, who has the competence to return it to the cultural system without betraying it? The first decision is the most difficult: establishing whether the corpus exists as historically relevant heritage or as private production, even if of great quality. These are two different conditions and require different responses. The systematic examination of the studio, the works, the documents and the materials leads to a clear judgment: the corpus is historically relevant and contains at least one element that rewrites a part of Italian and international art history. Among the archival materials, drawings dated 1956 emerge that document the theory and practice of the estroflessioni, works constructed with canvases stretched over projecting elements that physically modify the plane of the pictorial surface. Castellani and Bonalumi, whom official history identifies as the inventors of this language, begin their research only at the end of the 1950s. Carnà’s drawings of 1956 predate that moment. This is not a matter of rediscovering a forgotten artist: it is a matter of correcting a historical attribution.
On this basis the Archivio Marco Carnà is established, housed in the artist’s home in Carnate, directed by Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio by the wish of his wife. The systematic cataloguing of the works begins. The corpus takes form as a verifiable entity.

A cultural memory recovered. In 2024 the Museo MUST in Vimercate hosts the exhibition Marco Carnà. Uova di gallo 1961-1968, the first institutional public exhibition dedicated to Carnà, with a programme centred on his research of the 1960s. In 2022 the Fondazione Feierabend acquires five major works: a direct entry into an international reference collection for twentieth-century Italian art. In autumn 2026 the same foundation will publish a complete scientific monograph dedicated exclusively to Carnà’s work. In 2027 the Villa Reale in Monza will host a major retrospective exhibition. In the same year the Musei Civici di Monza will present an exhibition on the estroflessioni: a language that the archival documents place in Carnà’s research as early as 1956, prior to the research developed at the end of the 1950s by Castellani and Bonalumi. In collaboration with Fondazione Feierabend, an expanded version of the same exhibition at a European museum is planned. Negotiations are under way with a major international museum for the acquisition of the cycle of 130 plates of Dante’s Divine Comedy illustrated by him. Further initiatives are in preparation in the territory where Carnà lived, to document the substantial body of public art he produced: among the most significant examples, the stained glass windows of the Duomo di Monza, a splendid Gothic cathedral.
The entire house-studio can be visited in virtual reality on Matterport, with multimedia content, documented works and critical apparatus. Films and documentaries recovered from the RAI archives complete the public documentation of the corpus. The Marco Carnà Archive, housed in the artist’s home in Carnate, continues the cataloguing of a body of work that traverses without interruption more than seventy years of art history.
The Carnà case documents the process by which an invisible artistic heritage is reconstructed, verified and returned to the cultural system. It is the method Art Consulting applies every time a work, a corpus or a body of research exists but has not yet been recognised: when the value is there, but the system does not yet see it.