It is necessary "to inhabit a sense of home while in exile. To be rooted in the absence of place [...]. By uprooting oneself, one looks for more reality'. Simone Weil's words from her work Gravity and Grace, seem to reflect the condition of Cy Twombly, an American artist who lived for most of his life in Italy and in as many places he visited during his travels or only imagined. This sense of uprooting and of feeling at home in every place at the same time led him to "search for more reality", dilating the time of the creative process in an eternal wait, necessary to capture and investigate beauty in its contradictory form, in a process of continuous "dismemberment" of oneself and one's existence.

The Spell is a playlist, inspired by Cy Twombly and his works, in which beauty is shown "dismembered" in the different expressions of the creative process of the selected artists.

We asked the artists involved in the two editions of the Un/veiled project to select a piece to be ideally dedicated to the artist and his work. At the same time, the playlist consists of a selection of pieces chosen over the past few months to accompany posts and stories that talk about Cy Twombly and his work and that we have somehow wanted to put into dialogue with his work or with which we have traced subtle connections of meaning.

The playlist takes its name from a piece by Willow Skye-Biggs, “The Spell”, which we will use for the next scheduled post dedicated to the painting 'Untitled (Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)'. Cy Twombly often painted boats in his works, they represent a passage from life to death, from light to darkness, but they are also a metaphor for the artist of a rebirth. A state in-between, a sort of a Spell.

Eleonora Di Erasmo

(Managing Director of the Cy Twombly Foundation)