(by Martina Revello Lami)

Martina Revello Lami’s conversation with the author of the front and back cover closes the 2020 issue. It is now an established tradition for Ex Novo to host great artworks, but this year we launched an open call to select original creations inspired to the theme of the volume. The visionary reinterpretation of rationalist architecture proposed by Daniele Simoni beat off the competition, and his paintings Occasione mancata and La torre became the impactful front and back-cover of Ex Novo 2020. Alongside walking us through his career path in the interview Daniele explains us how the works created for our journal paved the way to a new cycle in his artistic production targeted to the deconstruction of scale, style and symmetry, the three pillars underlying the modernist language pursued by Italian architects from the 1920s to the 1940s. In doing so, Simoni’s work perfectly exemplifies the relevance of dealing with Fascist legacies also in contemporary aesthetics.

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(La Torre, @Daniele Simoni 2020, back cover of Ex Novo vol. 5)