Moon Foulard

2021

Culturgest, Lisbon, PT

curated by Bruno Marchand

By way of this lateral thinking, Moon Foulard brings together a group of elements related to the work and imagination of Italian stylist Emilio Pucci. This exhibition is marked by the practice of skiing, a given idea of elegance and comfort, summer leisure, sirens, moons and suns, patterns and reticula, flowers and other lush vegetation, but, in particular, an undeniable appetite for ornament and for the exercise of aesthetic expression. Its iconographic context may begin and end with Pucci, but its ideological scope is considerably broader. In fact, it can be situated within the trajectory of an already long-standing dispute about the place of aesthetic expression in artistic production – a debate around which all the rhetoric of modernity was organized, from the romantic period onwards, and which found its clearest expression when Adolf Loos prophesied, in 1910, that rejection of ornament was synonymous with spiritual strength. Spiritual strength is, of course, the moralist euphemism for this idea that aesthetic expression, the exercise of taste, of style, of form, of ornament and, ultimately, the pursuit of pleasure, should not be part of the supposedly progressive and socially engaged mission of art.

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