The inclination as we see it at the international opening of the La Spezia Premio del Golfo, already emphasized during the past 2002 edition, is confirmed once again in this new chapter. We can see, in fact, a broader range of participating institutions and countries this year in the La Spezia initiative. Not only museum directors and foundations from Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Great Britain, Italy, Holland, Portugal and Switzerland as in the past edition, but this year the participants also include emerging personalities in the art world in Slovenia, Denmark, Belgium and Turkey. This progressive expansion of confines in the organizational plans, the expression of a desire to lend the initiative a broader and more comprehensive breathing space, makes its future destiny more resourceful. In that sense, those at work in the artistic-cultural field are numerous and expectantly waiting to meet the participants, even before knowing the identities of the new artists suggested by those scholars and curators responsible for their respective interests European museums.
Constant Diversities is the title conferred on the diverse and previously unknown artistic encounters developed in the various cultural environments of our continent over the past two years and compared to other international engagements since, in fact, we are looking at particularly variegated examples of artistic creation, ones difficult to situate vis-à-vis uniform tendencies or to orient correspondingly in linguistic and formal terms.
The award event, while preserving a distinct supremacy of the tendency for pictorial form, nevertheless and necessarily opens the way to welcoming its most articulated concepts. This has allowed the participation of photo-based works and videos whose techniques, although seemingly released from the rigid profile of pictorial fabrication, acknowledge their derivations from various aspects of that discipline, all the same.
The growing tendency among the younger generation for exhibiting their creativity, although a sign of a greater consciousness of the ethic and aesthetic values of linguistics, is not, in itself, a guarantee of visible artistic results. Certain astute observers are convinced of having recently witnessed the phenomenon of a pattern tending to lend greater physiognomy to a “group artist” than to examples of well-defined personalities. As if a worrisome homologation based on the numerical quantity of participation in aesthetic events and phenomena were about to replace the traditional merits of individual study and experimentation in the field of art. Yet we can equally say that if such an opinion has good reason to exist, at the same time there is no lack of contemporary examples of well-grounded and important, undeniable individuality.
That is the sense of what the Premio del Golfo aims to achieve thanks to the contributions of numerous outstanding sources of observation and critical judgment.
As in the past, the “net” we have tendered in this edition is potentially equipped to highlight some of the most interesting young members of the current artistic panorama. Anyone leafing through the pages of this publication, or visiting the installation sites of the works, cannot help but recognize the vitality of the most recent generations motivated by the weight, nonetheless, of troubled times, but also of tenacious and courageous statements capable of standing up to the impending and threatening black clouds of our era.