With the patronage of the Municipality of Bagheria and in collaboration with Drago artecontemporanea, on 15 September at the Guttuso Museum, in the presence of the mayor of Bagheria, Filippo Maria Tripoli and the councilors Daniele Vella and Antonella Insinga and Piero Drago, “The rules of game” by Massimo Kaufmann who will be present at the inauguration, an interactive exhibition in which the public will interact with the works and the artist.
On display until November 15th is an artist’s chessboard made of wood and with regulation measurements (57×57 cm), and made up of the usual 64 squares and 32 chessmen painted with oil paints in 96 different colours.
Despite the clear subversion of the first rule of chess – which here no longer provides only for black and white to oppose each other but rather an infinite possibility of colors – the methods and rules of the game remain identical and the board perfectly usable: two sufficiently expert players can compare according to all the canonical rules without incurring any other inconvenience other than the perceptive confusion generated by the colors and accentuated by the continuous movement of the pieces.
To demonstrate this, the chessboard is made available to visitors who, upon reservation, will be able to compete in exciting duels during the entire exhibition period during the Museum’s opening hours.
The artist will also be open to challenges: a presence that transforms the exhibition project into a performance.
Massimo Kaufmann’s chessboards are conceived in a critical historical moment, 2020, which will not end with the waning of the pandemic but will continue in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It is therefore precisely in the theme of conflict that Kaufmann’s works have their roots: the “war”, which the game of chess represents and reproduces, shows itself under a different aspect. Each piece of the chessboard maintains its functional characteristics but has an identity, given by the colour, which prevents it from belonging to a specific alignment.
The two great thematic nuclei of the exhibition, which also includes the display of recent oil works by the artist, are conflict and painting.
For Massimo Kaufmann the main game remains painting, with its infinite possibilities of giving shape to a meaning, be it enigmatic or multipurpose, without ignoring that any game always has its rules. And colours, in painting, have always battled each other. In the most extraordinary works dedicated to war, such as those by Paolo Uccello or Boccioni, the clash takes shape through a chromatic dispute that seems to prepare an explosion of energy. The idea that colors represent dynamic energy, like trumpet blasts and drum rolls, shows all the will to power that has always accompanied the rhetoric of war.
The chess associations present in our area, A.S.D Chessmate Academy and A.S.D. United pedestrians will join, on the inauguration day and in the following weeks, the players who will compete on this particular battlefield

Inauguration: Sunday 15 September, 6.30 pm
Location: Villa Cattolica, Guttuso Museum. Via Rammacca, 9 Bagheria
Hours: Tuesday/Sunday 09.00/18.00
Reservation of chess games: 335.5489880
Exhibition info: Drago artecontemporanea 339.6752646