This book explores the multiple facets of identity thanks to a series of authors who have observed their inner reality and the world using innovative languages. In today’s scenario, their gazes are more necessary than ever: here, “restless art” is the child of the artists’ expressive urgency that, at the core of their feverish activity, generates unique and surprising works.
It’s a journey into the very beginning of art, into its spontaneous and instinctive origins, following the tensions of the expressionist line and the surrealist poetics open to the dream realm, beyond the boundaries of rational thought; an itinerary among works also from marginalised groups, today a precious and essential archive of the imaginary – Art Brut, therefore, visionary and with unprecedented languages, is on show.
Carla Accardi, Alighiero Boetti, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Keith Haring, Emilio Isgrò, Paul Klee, Anselm Kiefer, Maria Lai, Antonio Ligabue, Zoran Mušič, Emil Nolde, Yves Tanguy are just some of the artists displayed, alongside works from the San Lazzaro Archives preserved at the Museum of History of Psychiatry in Reggio Emilia.

Contents

Restless Art. Glimpses on Identity
Giorgio Bedoni

Certain Portraits.
The Aura of Myth, Traces of History
Claudio Spadoni

Shields from the Highlands of New Guinea
Johann Feilacher

Cartographic Digressions about Restless Art
Davide Papotti

From Archive to Museum:
San Lazzaro's Heritage and its Conversion into a Museum before and after the Psychiatric Hospital's Closure
Chiara Bombardieri e Alessandro Gazzotti

Restless Signs
Adelaide Ricci

Restless Art. Multiple Outlooks, Plural Identities
Marco Aime

Art is a Guarantee of Sanity
Carine Fol

Works

The Metamorphic Face

Seriality, Obsessions, Interior Monologues

Cartographies, Maps, and Visionary Worlds