di Genina Jacobone

We met the master Montevago several years ago, he was the first artist "Leadership Medica" edited. Since then it has passed a lot of time, the way gone was long and uphill.

By these years there has been an anthological exhibition devoted to Montevago at the Villa San Carlo Borromeo in Senago, seat of the Foundation "Il secondo Rinascimento" (The second renaissance), presided over by professor Armando Verdiglione. A frame of great prestige since the long story of the Villa. 

In the area, starting from the IV sec. b.C., it has succeeded a Celtic settlement, a Roman fortress and a Longobard fortress. The building rose in the fourteenth century thanks to the Visconti that later made over to the Borromeo, another famous Lombard family. 

It seems that in 1630 cardinal Federico Borromeo gathered at the Villa some of the most eminent theologians of the time, leaving Milan flagellated by the Black Dead. It was renewed the climate of the Decamerone of Boccaccio, even if the matters treated by those presents would be less dissolute. 

About Villa San Carlo literary men as Diderot, Pindemonte, Stendhal and Croce wrote and, getting to our days, the great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the dramatists Eugéne Ionesco spent a time there. 

Recovered in 1911, the building - 7,000 sm. long inside a 10 hectares park - has been furthermore renewed in the past years, becoming a multifunction congress centre and an ideal scenario for photographic reportages and movie sets.

In the monograph we devoted to Montevago some years ago, two renowned critics described his art this way:

"The artist lives in a metropolis that not only has seen in our century signs of change and culture, movements and key personages of the painting, but that also offer to the everybody eyes the drama of time and life. Sironi on a side painted towns, outskirts, the sheds; Montevago, master and painter of the today town, has perceived the climate of this fabulous uproar, of this vertiginous growth above, with the big post-modern skyscrapers and people slipping away. 

That's why Montevago is not a painter by himself, he catches his time, he senses the most testimonial symptoms." (Carlo Franza) 

"Montevago elected towns as a symbol of the conceiving of life of his, refuge and creation of man, nestle and overcome fortress, often distressing soulless skeletons. It seems to us that the work of Montevago must be intended in this terms; he is an artist of deep and suffered humanity looking at life with undying hope, but undergoing the impact of the disappointments men lives daily." (Lella Tucci) 

So at Villa Borromeo it got the artistic path of Montevago. 

The exposition of Senago is a passage of great importance, confirming his value and setting him among the great painters of the 20th century, cast since time into future with his towns climbing the sky and a little phantom, getting deeply in the human psyche. 

Towns expressing a concrete reality as well as a still unknown reality.