SILENCE IN COLOR

by Michelangelo Antonioni

curated by Enrica Antonioni

project by Renzo Piano

Tempio di Adriano, Roma

September 29th – October 22nd 2006

Promoted by: Comune di Roma – Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali, Dipartimento Cultura; Camera di Commercio di Roma; Regione Lazio

in collaboration with: Festa Internazionale del Cinema di Roma; Doc Fest – Garad srl; Casa delle Letterature; Casa del Cinema

I am not sure why Michelangelo decided to give his silence over the painting, but I might be able to intuit an answer. It is because he has always been a painter: with his colors (“The red desert”), his enlargements so grainy they border an abstraction (“Blow up”), and further, the famous explosion sequence (“Zabriskie Point”) – truly a succession of abstract paintings in movement (I am certain Bob Rauschenberg studied them very closely). And so he is a painter, too – a painter because hi sentire life he has framed and explored close-ups, eyes, rocks, hands, trees, mouths, leaves and exploded refrigerators, and now he gives them back to us silently, fragment by fragment.

Thank you, Michelangelo. You will nerver cease to amaze us.

Renzo Piano

For us directors, seeing is a necessity. Also for a painter, seeing is the concern. While for a painter uncovering a static reality is involved (or a rhythm if you like, but a rhythm fixed in sign), for a director the problemi s seizing a reality which matures and consumes, and to propose this movement, this arriving and following, as a new perception.

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1963