MACAM – The Genesis

Nn the fall of 1984 Gastone Cecconello and art critic Mario Pistono went to Maglione to meet director Maurizio Corgnati, who was born here and where he chose to live all his life. The meeting was very convivial, full of anecdotes about the world of art and entertainment; peppered with the unparalleled witticisms that the exchanges between Pistono and Corgnati brought forth with each reflection.

But the discussion was far from disengaged. The theme of how to bring art to the people — with a pioneering advance on the developments coagulating around “local development” today — emerged clearly, not least in light of the then 20-year experience of the Painting Prize “Santhià”, chaired by Pistono, which played such a large part in defining the community identity of the Vercelli center.

Dazzling was what became the last humorous line of the meeting, which became very operative soon after: Corgnati, referring to Maglione, sardonically sentenced, in dialect, “…the country is certainly ugly, but on the other hand the people are also fat!” After the laughter, charged indeed with understanding for the whole sociological bearing of that assumption (the cultural closure, the inertia toward the maintenance of the buildings, the forced distance of the peasant world from the calls of the contemporary, etc…),

it was Cecconello who proposed the idea of calling a selection of his painter friends, some also orbiting within the “Santhià” prize, to intervene on the crumbling walls and falling houses of Maglione. Pistono enthusiastically underscored the proposal, reporting to Corgnati the brief history of the so-called “Consorteria dei figuranti,” a group of artists led by Cecconello who the year before had even given themselves a “manifesto” establishing their operation as itinerant painters.

That proposal, made by Cecconello and Mario Pistono to Corgnati, was followed by months of meetings and fine-tuning of what became the first edition of the frescoes in Maglione the following year.

Cecconello, Pistono and Corgnati at the latter’s kitchen table in Maglione at their first meeting

Here is a brief summary of those beginnings taken from Cecconello’s biography written by Alice Actis and published in the 2012 monograph published by Silvana Editoriale.

In the 1980s [Cecconello] was approaching fresco painting. The first time he tried his hand at this new technique was in 1982, in San Paolo Cervo, near Biella, where to a stonemason who was fixing up his own hut, Gastone offered to create a fresco on the facade. The 60 x 80 cm fresco depicts stone breakers intent on their work: “This was my first fresco, I never imagined what would happen later.”

This experience would constitute the incipit of the activity of the “Consorteria dei Figuranti,” known as the “Tectores Errantes,” formalized by the Manifesto written by Mario Pistono and signed on September 8, 1984 by Gastone (who was also the group’s coordinator), Sergio Alice, Enzo Bellini, Alberto Cropelli, Annibale Follini, Giulio Picelli, Mariano Pieroni, Epifanio Pozzato, and Vanni Saltarelli.

[…] Between the artist and the director (M. Corgnati) began a long association and a fruitful intellectual confrontation. Both had coalesced in the desire to change the face of Maglione, convincing some artists to fresco the facades of the houses with one of their works, a bit like what had happened in Arcumeggia between 1956 and 1970, where along the narrow streets of the small village one could admire frescoes by Achille Funi, Aldo Carpi, Gianfilippo Usellini, Giuseppe Migneco, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Giuseppe Monanari, Aligi Sassu, Gianni Dova and many others. Before long, this project became a reality.

On Sept. 20, 1985, the day of the patron saint’s feast of St. Maurice, Reggiori, Trolese, Follini, Cropelli, Alice, Saltarelli, Pieroni, Picelli, Bellini and Carena, with Cecconello in the lead, set to work to create MACAM, Maglione’s Museum of Contemporary Art Outdoors. The success would be such that for many more years many other artists would lend their talents to leave a trace of their passage in Maglione.

A story that needs to be told

This is a story that needs to be told, since-unreasonably-on the brochure and more extensively on the M.A.C.A.M. website there is a stumped narrative of this significant source, of this amicable and affective sphere. Gastone Cecconello and Mario Pistono are never mentioned. Nor is a picture of Cecconello’s works published on the printed brochure, even though they were of the seminal ones.

Cecconello, there is no valid reason to ignore him or to keep him silent, was the spark that triggered the initiative, the one who implemented with a very pragmatic manner the procedure to carry out the interventions with the true fresco technique, the one who coagulated the first energies and the very first painters who intervened on site; Corgnati was certainly the noble father, the master of the house who later – when Cecconello abandoned the collaboration – gathered the other illustrious artists who today make up the M. mosaic.A.C.A.M..