Aldo Spoldi (Crema, 1950 – )
At the top of the Villa’s main staircase, some artworks suggesting performative moments of music and painting are seen while crossing to the building’s east wing, where the first room entered by visitors houses Aldo Spoldi’sCommedia pittorica.
Casting himself in the roles of producer, director, and puppeteer, in 1982 Spoldi applied wooden panelto the walls as brightly painted reliefs; they depict a clumsy puppet and crooked cabinets, suggesting the room might have been accustomed to hosting do-it-yourself marionette shows. In the corner above the composition, a headline, writ large like a publicity flier, proclaims an extravagant show with muscular feats of strength, marvelous horsemanship, exceptional athletic competitions, and miraculous demonstrationsof marksmanship; such wording recalls itinerant fairs in the provinces. Nearby another wall relief reproduces a passage from a classic 20th-century text: Il baronerampante by Italo Calvino, from which Spoldi citesa key paragraph from the story about a young man who chooses to live suspended above the ground.
