Arcadia, Bally Foundation review — artists on the quest for an ideal state

The train stop just before Lugano, for those coming from Milan, is called Paradiso. It’s good preparation if you’re on your way to see an exhibition called Arcadia, which is currently installed in Lugano’s Villa Heleneum. On show are works from 19 artists, many new, some site-specific, that emerge from the search for a perfect place, either imaginary or real.

Certainly this is a heavenly part of the world, with its thickly wooded mountains that slope into an apparently infinite lake, its regular sunshine, its roads that curve along the water’s palm-fringed edge and its gardens filled with exotic plants. “That was my first impression,” says Vittoria Materrese, the director of the Bally Foundation which now occupies Villa Heleneum. “It didn’t occur to me that I was looking at something that had been effectively man-made.” Much of this Arcadia’s pleasures — the sweeping Corniche, the abundant foreign foliage — only arrived in the 1930s.

At Villa Heleneum, which the Swiss leather goods and fashion company has taken on a 15-year lease for its foundation, the house itself is exhibit number one when it comes to the creation of dreams. Inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles, it is a fancy pink confection, commissioned by a socialite called Hélène Bieber, who was lured here in the 1920s by the creative community and the promise of a life lived beautifully. The villa was completed in 1934, but Bieber rarely stayed here and by the outbreak of the second world war could barely afford its upkeep. It was bought by the municipality on her death in 1967.

For Matarrese, a curator who worked at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris for 12 years, this is the third exhibition she has staged here. While Bieber’s — largely unfulfilled — fantasy was to fill it with musicians, dancers and artists, Matarrese has done so.

The current show was kick-started by Matarrese’s investigation into the archive of Lugano’s history. She has picked out postcards showing the gradual glamorisation of the town from the 1920s onwards and paper stencils made in the 1950s when the incomers fell for the idea of decorating their homes like Indian palaces. Watercolours by the writer Hermann Hesse — vibrantly coloured pictures, Fauvist in style, of rooftops and fields — serve as reminders of the area’s then bucolic appeal. He had moved to Ticino in 1919.

Other exhibits offer a different view. In Julia Steiner’s sweeping mural, painted directly on to the white walls of the second-floor landing in near-transparent black gouache, we sense the fleeting nature of pleasure in lotusland. Her imagery seems carried through the space on a breeze. Adrien Missika’s photographs of LA’s palm trees, following in the footsteps of American artist Ed Ruscha, who documented the city’s dying palms in 1971, appear like pressed botanical specimens. Tall, skinny, sparse and transplanted (they were brought to LA for the 1932 Olympic Games), their dignity was squandered in their service to an invented landscape.

The palms of Lugano, by contrast, are thriving — even causing issues with their propensity to self-propagate — and this too is an active exhibition. Maxime Rossi offers up jars of Indian sweets, semicircular orange candies that we can consume with as much joy as a Lugano sunset. Virgile Ittah and Kai Yoda, who work as Ittah Yoda, spent five weeks on site, subscribing to Arcadia’s classical illusion with a stunning chimera formed of hand-moulded wax bound with local marble dust. They also offer visitors (a limited supply of) perfume, woody and waxy and golden, in a handblown vessel; paintings that allude to those found in caves; and shallow steel pools of brackish water scattered across the floor. In another room is Lou Masduraud’s “Active Substances Fountain”, pumping out an antidepressant formula — an unsolicited obliteration of both joy and pain.

In an exhibition that swoops through moods and spaces, outside the villa in the lush trees Raphaël Emine has hung stoneware forms with complex 3D-printed interiors, holey like a Swiss cheese. He is hoping they will soon become homes to happy insects. “Arcadia for me is an imaginary country where human and animal or insect architecture is synthesised,” he says as we sit outside Villa Heleneum, watching the jumping waves of the lake’s deep blue water. Like everything else here that is not quite what it seems, the lake does a very good impression of the sea.

Beyond the house, Lugano’s fertile gardens burst with their exotic plants and flowers, while luxury brands blossom in the cobbled streets of the wealthy old town, alongside the banks. The hills above bristle with capacious modern villas. There could be no better spot to investigate that slippery space between the imaginary and the real; the natural and the fake. In Lugano, you might not find the illusory state of Arcadia, but you can enjoy the view.

‘Arcadia’ is at the Bally Foundation, Lugano, until January 12, ballyfoundation.ch