TRASLAZIONE DEI SIGNIFICATI E (IN)DETERMINAZIONE DEL CONTESTO NELLA PUBLIC ART: Considerazioni teoriche e storico-artistiche attorno alla pittura urbana di Andrea Ravo Mattoni

The paper investigates the recovery of classical artworks done through street art by Andrea ‘Ravo’ Mattoni, thus connecting his practice with social responsibility and aesthetic contextualisation emerging from public art in the wake of John Latham’s contextualism and Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture. The choice to recover classical iconography and repertoire from the sites of his interventions offers further the chance to consider the role of contemporary artists in expanding public consciousness and accessibility to cultural heritage by transferring images and meanings from museum rooms to open streets in the original sites. In doing so Ravo Mattoni’s murales try to immerse the viewer into a purely aesthetic and dialogic encounter with classical artworks – that is, a sensitive encounter that is not mediated by the museum context or art history, thus entering rather the undetermined realm of the viewer’s individual and everyday experience. The works of Ravo Mattoni present themselves as an opportunity or medium that allow a fuller sensitive experience of art, thus superseding its mere visual dimension. The paper particularly resorts to the observations of Grant Kester on socially engaged art practice, which explore the public artist’s role caught in between a transfer of meaning, and on the considerations of Miwon Kwon on site specificity, with regard to the indeterminateness of the aesthetic context and to the travelling habit of public artists.