COMO _ WALL PAINT PUBLIC PERMANENT WORK "ASILO SANT'ELIA XXL.TXT"

TERRAGNI RIVISTO

edited by Roberto Borghi

Walking through Como you can see a good number of buildings designed by Giuseppe Terragni. Two of them can now be seen again: Novocomun and Asilo Sant'Elia. The first masterpiece of the famous rationalist architect stands out in a wall painting created by Fabrizio Musa a year ago, not far from the Duomo. Asilo Sant'Elia is the subject of the two macroscopic, impressive works that will be inaugurated on Saturday September 16 2006.
Terragni and Rationalism now belong to the cultural identity of this city. But this does not mean that some of the most famous buildings of the twentieth century are the object of curious, accurate, amazed glances, the only glances that allow those who pass by them to really see.
It may be that the attention that neither the tourist signs nor the centenary celebrations have managed to arouse may arise, at least in part, from the presence of some murals that tear the urban landscape with a certain paradoxical delicacy. Sometimes reviewing is an indispensable action to - to go to, to try to - see what we keep looking at absent-mindedly. And I must admit that I myself, after having looked a bit bewildered at the silhouette of the Sant'Elia Asylum silhouetted on the side of a building site, I felt the need to measure myself in a new way with the original.
Although made in a rigorous black and white, and with the set of trees in the background and machines in the foreground, as if to underline the everyday point of view, Sant'Elia XXL.txt I and Sant'Elia XXL.txt II are their way monumental works, and not just for the size. Monument is a word that derives from the Latin verb moneo, which means to exhort, admonish, make people remember. Fabrizio Musa's wall paintings are a warning to see architecture, the city, reality with the right amount of surprise.