“Mapplethorpe Unframed” is the title of the podcast written and hosted by Nicolas Ballario and included in the format “on Art. L’arte legge il mondo”, created by Marsilio Arte to describe the present using art as a compass. The six episodes of the podcast accompany the trilogy of exhibitions dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, which opened in Venice at the Stanze della Fotografia, curated by Denis Curti, before moving on to the Palazzo Reale in Milan and the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome. The first episode, already available on the main platforms, brings together the voices of curator Denis Curti, historian and art critic Francesca Alfano Miglietti and journalist Carlo Antonelli and, like the second episode scheduled for 18 November, is inspired by the themes of the Venice exhibition. We asked Nicolas Ballario to guide us through the podcast

Mapplethorpe Unframed: looking beyond the frame

There are artists who do not simply photograph the world, but question it. Robert Mapplethorpe is one of them. His images do not seek to please, but to reveal. They offer no consolation, but confront the viewer with an uncomfortable yet magnetic truth. Perhaps this is why they continue to speak to us, to hurt us, to enchant us.
Mapplethorpe Unframed was born from the desire to recount this complexity: to give voice and body back to an artist who made rebellion a visual language and beauty a form of resistance.
The spirit of the podcast is that of a journey into a turbulent era, post-war America with its bourgeois dream and its façade of perfection, until the radical upheavals of the counterculture. In those years, creativity was a political gesture, art mingled with life and every image could become a form of revolution. Mapplethorpe moves through all this like a foreign and necessary body: he observes, absorbs, transforms. With his camera, he redraws the boundaries of desire and representation, transforming the forbidden into elegance, shadow into light, flesh into icon.
In six episodes, Mapplethorpe Unframed combines my narrative with the reflections of numerous guests from different fields, each with their own perspective and sensibility. Together, we try to interpret the tensions that inhabit his work: the struggle between eros and form, between freedom and censorship, between desire and discipline. What emerges is a multifaceted portrait, in which the artist is not only a provocateur, but also an interpreter of his time, an alchemist capable of transforming excess into balance and fragility into power.
To recount Mapplethorpe today means returning to question the relationship between art and identity, between body and power, between what we choose to show and what we prefer to hide. It means asking ourselves what remains of that absolute search for form and beauty in a world that has changed rules, languages and sensibilities. Perhaps, more than ever, his gaze still forces us to look at ourselves. Without a frame, unframed.

Nicolas Ballario

https://www.marsilioarte.it/mostre-ed-eventi/onart/

BIO
Born in Saluzzo in 1984, Nicolas Ballario focuses on contemporary art applied to the media.
He began his professional career at Oliviero Toscani’s factory, “La Sterpaia”, where he became cultural director. He has collaborated with leading art institutions and numerous publications. He is currently the author and host of contemporary art formats on Radio Uno Rai and collaborates with L’Espresso and Il Giornale dell’Arte. In 2019, he hosted the photography format Camera Oscura on LA7, and since 2020 he has been at the head of Sky Arte’s formats Io ti vedo, ti mi senti?, The Square and Italia Contemporanea. He is the founder of Studio Cucù and curated the dossier that led to Alba being proclaimed Capital of Contemporary Art 2027.