The Sistine Chapel is in Montorso

Never has there been a work like a five-story condominium inside a monumental Venetian villa, around which the village has nestled for four centuries. Montorso becomes the center of the most ambitious and visionary contemporary art of 2024: the installation by Catalan artist Jorge R.Pombo, 50 years old, inaugurated on March 1, has completed his New Universal Judgment in the hall of Villa Da Porto, chosen for its over 15 meters of height useful for hosting the canvas composed of 13 pieces for 180 square meters of breathtaking painting. Pombo is no stranger to comparison with great masterpieces: from Barcelona, he moved over the years to Paris, then to New York, passing through Greenland and Siberia where he faced extreme weather conditions and worked on maps and buildings. In Lucca, he reinterpreted the Passion in Velasquez and Caravaggio; in Venice, he tackled Tintoretto at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and at the 2022 Biennale, in the Cameroon pavilion, he proposed variations on Leonardo's Salvator Mundi. At the Diocesan Museum of Vicenza in the same year, he anticipated the Judgment with a biblical separation of the waters. Could he not try with Michelangelo?
In recent years, Jorge Pombo, settled in Reggio Emilia, has built his challenge: thanks to the pandemic, he dreamed of an immense space where he could recreate his own version of the Sistine Chapel and laid the foundations to realize it with the Veronese gallery ARTantide by Paolo Mozzo, who promotes him. Adhering to the Ethical Art movement, the artist wanted to involve people at risk of social exclusion due to their past in prison or addiction. Identified by the Municipality and Caritas of Reggio Emilia, he hired them and made them co-responsible for the work that was composed for the first time at Villa Da Porto, where the gallery owner Mozzo arrived called by another artist, Alberto Salvetti, for the Art Biennale of Montorso. Chance events and intersections materialized in the approval of the exhibition by Mayor Diego Zaffari and the president of Pro Loco Daniela Bastianello. Passing through the wooden gate, the impact is cinematic: the left wall, secured to scaffolding, rises on the Vatican composition which is entirely blurred here, losing the identification of the characters in favor of their universality. The Judgment is there and not there, just as the boundary between good and evil, between the condemned and the chosen, in a way "that anyone, regardless of their religion or faith, can search and identify." Christ is barely discernible and becomes pure light.
Visits from March 2 to 31, from Monday to Friday 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., on Saturdays and Sundays 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., ticket 5 euros). On Easter Monday, the villa will be open as on Saturday and Sunday.