Art and fossils: a reflection on dinosaurs and their influence in the 20th century

For several weeks now, the Ardinghelli Palace in L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region , has been hosting a group exhibition entitled Terreno : traces of accessible everyday life . This city of the ancient kingdom of Naples, located in central Italy and devastated by several earthquakes, has since 2021 been home to one of the headquarters of the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (MaXXI), created in Rome in 2009 and supported by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. L'Aquila MaXXI is oriented towards art in situ , that is, projects specifically designed for a place that, if transported, would lose their meaning. An idea contrary to any museum, an institution that, as is well known, is put together with fragments conceived for any other space.

This is the challenge of Terreno , the exhibition conceived by art historian Lisa Andreani, bringing together works and writings by artists with artefacts and photographic documents from the Museum of Civilisations in Rome, design projects, architecture and sound productions.

The subtitle is a reference to Gianni Celati (1937-2022), the Italian writer, critic and visual artist who, in 2008, when publishing an anthology of Antonio Delfini (1907-1963), referred to his diaries as a "montage of relics, whose value, more than in their rarity, lies in their normality and their discard, and which, when brought together, bring to light the transience of the available everyday life."

A collection of ephemeral things that outlive us, a definition of a museum that Andreani materializes by combining scenes, landscapes and gestures from that everyday life that often goes unnoticed. A dialogue between images, sounds and objects from popular culture, science and contemporary art, a reflection on the remains that our passage on Earth leaves for the future.

Among them, a globe where the continents are populated not by Renaissance monsters but by dinosaurs and, next to it, on the wall, a sort of topographical model in wood. These are "Mappa Mondo" (2007) and "Logogrifo" (1989), two works by the Turin publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929-2022) who, in addition to his legacy as a producer of art books, dedicated his life to printing a geological history of the world in the form of footprints, paper fossils, engraved letters, meanders, altimetry and bleach targets.

For Gribaudo, logogriphs – that reality, event or behaviour that cannot be understood – are layers of blotting paper. In 2024, a series of them was exhibited in Graz (Austria) and at the Museion in Bolzano. The exhibition was called “The Weight of the Concrete” to mark its distance from abstraction, but also the relationship of these white-on-white reliefs with the materials that shape them and with the cultural landscape of Turin.

One of them, the symbol of the Gribaudo Archive, emerged from the image of a brain cell enlarged millions of times , a gift that Gribaudo received from her friend, the artist Paola Levi Montalcini, the twin sister of Rita, the neurologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986. That neuron with its dendrites has been looking down at us since 1974 like a fossil invertebrate of our era from the reinforced concrete ceiling of the studio designed in 1974 by the architect – also from Turin – Andrea Bruno.

A reference to the stones of the city whose columns, churches and sidewalks are plagued by bugs from the geological eras without life being altered by it.

On the other hand, Gribaudo's interest in dinosaurs began in Oceania , that kind of lost world, where the strangest plants, animals and rocks coexist with the present.

But it was consolidated in the natural history museum in New York, where the bones of these animals are used as skeletons thanks to the magnates who paid for the work of these human beings who sleep hugging a dinosaur and wake up ready to give it color, shape, and filling.

Gribaudo, who comes from the art of printing, created a graphic type with the wooden pieces that are used to make dinosaur models : an inverted U or tuning fork – the ribs – that is repeated in many of his works, like a type of Jurassic printing press. Others of his dinosaurs resemble animals from European cave art because, after all, our humanity has never stopped living with them.

But, as Terreno also points out, the 20th century cannot be conceived without dinosaurs. The United States, let us remember, is the country with the largest number of cars per family; Turin, the city of contemporary art, the former capital of the automobile. Every car is powered by oil and its derivatives.

And although this hydrocarbon is actually the result of the transformation of organic matter from zooplankton and algae, in the 1970s children's magazines showed how the decomposed corpse of a dinosaur was transformed into a black, oily stratum awaiting drilling to bring it to the surface.

A false but effective association that arose from the press campaigns of the oil company Sinclair Oil and Refining Corporation , a company founded in 1916, whose advertisers in the 1930s used a dozen dinosaurs for their campaigns, from which they selected “Dino,” the brontosaurus, as their corporate image that made its way into everything in the form of figurines and balloons that were distributed at service stations.

So much so that it became the favorite pet of American consumers and in 1975, it was declared an honorary member of the Natural History Museum in New York, which Gribaudo visited accompanying another of his friends: Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), who, before dying, held his first exhibition in this city.

Both witnessed how, through the petrol tank and the shops with the most absurd objects, dinosaurs settled in our lives from where today – as Terreno suggests – there is no one to get them out. It is not for nothing that the Gribaudo studio welcomes us with a fossilized neuron while, next to it, in the garden, a brontosaurus stands guard, adorned with the marks of the formwork and its more than human form.