Archive Daolio: testimonies of aesthetic criticism

Abstract

In 2013 Roberto Daolio, an important Italian contemporary art critic and curator passed away. His heirs Antonio Pascarella and Stefano Daolio gave his legacy to the MAMbo museum, made of the works of art he had been collecting over 30 years among the artists who crossed his professional (and often affective) career. This text is a brief analysis of the methodologies adopted and the problems encountered while studying his collection, as well as of all the testimonies and documents of its acquisition. The whole study group has had the unique chance of facing the problem of analysis, conservation and exposure of such a particular collection, in order to integrate new aspects in the ways acquisitions are usually studied. Although deeply different in quality, genre, format and support every work of art and every document in the archive had Roberto Daolio as common denominator, a new source of narration of the history of art in our most recent past.