VIDEO 3 – MULTIMEDIA GALLERY OF THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS IN ROME
VIDEOFOCUS
curated by the School of New Technologies for Art
On the occasion of the second edition of RAW – Rome Art Week, the week of contemporary art that brings together galleries, institutions and non-profit spaces in the capital in a single event, the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome presents an exhibition by 15 students, between the historic Colleoni Hall – embellished by the monumental cast of the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, made by Verrocchio – and the adjacent Hall 4. The exhibition will remain open throughout the week, until 14 October 2017, in accordance with the RAW calendar.
VIDEO GALLERY AND OPEN LAB
On the opening day, Monday 9 October, there will also be a special opening of some of the Graphic Arts Workshops of the Academy, between 1 pm and 8 pm: the public will be able to visit the classrooms while the students are at work, experimenting with engraving, printing and paper production techniques, together with the teachers Andrea Lelario, Massimo Arduini, Ferdinando Fedele and Laura Salvi.
On the same day, at 6 pm, the VIDEO3 Multimedia Gallery will be inaugurated, a project of the School of New Technologies for Art, which will feature the exhibition – on the three monitors placed in the entrance corridor – of some of the best video works produced by the students. The works will be selected each year through a call for applications. For this first occasion, the VIDEOFOCUS exhibition will be presented, which was already hosted in November 2016 by the Sapienza University of Rome.
The artists: Lucia Bricco, Nicole Cerrone, Alberto Costanzo, Erica Curci, Ola Czuba, Francesco Marino, Farnoosh Samadi, Carlotta Scognamiglio.
APERITIF AND LIVE SET
During the opening event in the Academy’s inner courtyard, at aperitif time, there will be a live sound set by Federico Paganelli and Riccardo Gasparini: electronics and guitars, for an improvisational journey through dilated atmospheres, evocative sounds, mnemonic abstractions and rarefied textures.
THE EXHIBITION
Curated by lecturers Helga Marsala and Gabriele Simongini, the exhibition was created on the initiative of the Student Council. Fifteen names were selected through a call for entries by an internal committee: Giulia Carioti, Zhaoyan Chen, Ivo Cotani, Marco Eusepi, Vito Gara, Michael Mancini, Salim Mir Alaiee, Tommaso Moretti, Carla Pasqualucci, Flavio Orlando, Gianmarco Savioli, Angelica Speroni, Nastasya Voskoboynikova, XiHan Zhang, Damianos Zisimou.
The title is the same as a famous poem by Eugenio Montale, taken from the collection “Ossi di seppia”. An image with a strong visual connotation, which is also the opening line of the two quatrains in alternating rhyme.
Perhaps one morning walking in glassy air,
arid, turning around, I shall see the miracle take place:
the nothingness behind me, the void behind
behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.
Then, as if on a screen, trees, houses, hills
trees, houses, hills for the usual deception.
But it will be too late; and I shall go away in silence
among the men who do not turn around, with my secret.
The story of a revelation, in the heart of a crystal morning: the world around dissolves, things implode and the substance of the world evaporates like mist. And it is then on an ideal screen – a conceptual, poetic, philosophical, imaginative plane – that places and shapes, objects and landscape resurface, but in a new guise. Reality has become shadow, illusory projection, dream and inconsistency.
With all the disorientation and melancholy released by Montale’s intense pen, this small metaphysical experience is outlined, which has become a common theme here among the works of the young artists. All works in which, in some way, the experience of fading, transmutation and fragmentation remains the protagonist.
THE ARTISTS
Encompassing painting, photography, installation, video, sound and engravings, the exhibition is structured as a journey made up of absences and projections, of residues, voids and mutations.
A blank, silent book, from which the words have slipped away, flakes apart in the progression of an increasingly thin paper weight (Speroni). The life of an elderly man is a flashback that flows quickly, before death, while mental images are translated into an electronic score
(Zhang). A small rural view freezes in the adamantine light of spring, between green and blue that fit together and almost merge into a liquid paste (Orlando). The lyrical adventure of colour, pushed towards abstraction, intercepts the invisible lines of the landscape and the sentimental modulations of the gaze (Eusepi). Virtuosity in pencil strokes, imagining mutant creatures, the offspring of a contemporary mythology (Moretti). A body coincides with its own shadow, being a spectre, a presence in motion, the announcement of an absence (Pasqualucci). Photographs of schoolchildren reproduced on canvas, with the history of the Cypriot people emerging among the livid, indistinct faces: individual memory is pulverised in collective identity (Zisimou).
And again, lace doilies, like micro artefacts of everyday life, become immaterial chromatic stamps (Carioti). A small patch of lawn on a wall is all that remains: the surrounding landscape has disappeared, contracted into a clod (Gara). A tribute to Piet Mondrian, in the form of a design object, and to his extraordinary research on plastic synthesis and abstract form (Mancini). Landscapes at dusk and snow-covered paths, in the subtlety of the brown mark and the white void between the plate and the paper (Voskoboynikova). Reflections on black, in the obsession with monochrome surfaces, stains on the sheet, marks in the urban space, letting everything become mournful seduction, the syntax of emptiness (Savioli). Still lifes imbued with 20th-century deconstructions, thinning reality in the exercise of painting (Cotani). An attempt to measure time and space, in the utopia of a sound machine that marks the path (Chen).
Finally, set up in the project room of Aula 4, the video installation by Salim Mir Alaiee: the experience of a bicycle ride is transformed into an intangible journey, recording only the shadow of the cyclist and the rectangle of sky above his head. The surrounding city is out of sight, vanished, excluded from memory, while – in the scenic reconstruction – the sky is projected onto the floor and the shadow lives again on a screen.
INFO
eventi@abarm.it
www.accademiabelleartiroma.it
www.romeartweek.com