Gribouillage/Scarabocchio. Da Leonardo da Vinci a Cy Twombly. Curated by Francesca Alberti and Diane Bodart with associate curator Philippe-Alain Michaud. Villa Médicis – Académie de France à Rome, Rome. 03.03.2022 – 22.05.2022. Beaux Arts, Paris. 08.01.2023 – 30.05.2023

The exhibition Gribouillage/Scarabocchio. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, curated by Francesca Alberti and Diane Bodart with the collaboration of Philippe-Alain Michaud as associate curator, explores the many facets of scribbling in the artistic field—from the sketches drawn on the back of paintings to the scribbles that become real works, highlighting one of the most unknown and least controlled aspects of the practice of drawing.

The exhibition presents around 300 original works ranging from the Renaissance to contemporary times and shows how these experimental, transgressive, regressive, and liberating graphic practices, which seem to obey no rules, have always marked the history of artistic creation.

Baruchello is present with a work from 1962, consisting of collages on a wooden board.

The work titled Abstract – Expressionism – Zoologique, through an assemblage peculiar to the artist, juxtaposes clippings taken from the French edition of a 1962 book by Desmond Morris, La biologie de l’art — dedicated to experiments carried out in a Rotterdam Zoo in the late 1950s that investigated chimpanzee drawings—and clippings from a 1961 Cy Twombly exhibition catalogue . The juxtaposition of images and captions is achieved, however, by losing the original connections and going so far as to describe a fragment of a Twombly drawing as if it had been made by a gorilla, present in other images of the work.

Baruchello does not mention the source texts in his work and leaves the ironic association he has made “secret”.

The exhibition is produced by Accademia di Francia in Rome – Villa Medici and the Beaux-Arts in Paris, with the support of Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome. The exhibition is developed in two successive presentations, one at the Villa Medici, Rome (2022), and the other at the Beaux-Arts, Paris (2023).