The collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the Municipality of Frascati with the Department of Culture, and the Scuderie Aldobrandini began on 21 July with an exhibition by former students: a project aimed at promoting events and exhibitions featuring the best talents trained in the Academy’s classrooms, in the fields of visual arts, fashion, graphic design and multimedia languages.
The multipurpose centre of the Scuderie, which regularly hosts cultural activities promoted by the Municipality of Frascati, is structured over two levels, including the Tuscolano Museum, with its archaeological collections, a large auditorium and several spaces for temporary exhibitions. Originally the service area of the villa of the same name, built at the end of the 16th century for Cardinal Aldobrandini, the new structure was inaugurated in 2000 after a restoration and adaptation project overseen by the architect Massimiliano Fuksas.
FORMER STUDENTS IN AN EXHIBITION
The rooms on the first floor are home to “IERI OGGI DOMANI”, an exhibition curated by the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, coordinated by Francesca Lilli, dedicated to the work of ten of the most interesting young artists who have completed their studies in the last three years: Dario Agati, Michele Bellini, Aleksandra Czuba, Arianna De Nicola, Angelo Di Bello, Luca Di Luzio, Giulia Lanza, Lorenzo Modica, Mattia Cleri Polidori, Sofia Ricciardi. An opportunity to continue to follow and enhance the career paths of those who, now outside the academic institution, are beginning their journey in the difficult world of the art system: emerging talents to be supported beyond the conventional time of a course of study and beyond the spaces dedicated to training tout court.
The idea of an Academy as a breeding ground, combining opportunity, assessment and shared responsibility, also passes through here.
THE WORKS ON DISPLAY
Selected by the professors who are members of the Academy’s Exhibition Committee – Cecilia Casorati, Pietro Capogrosso, Vincenzo Scolamiero, Gabriele Simongini – the works span different languages. From the large painting by Dario Agati, which uses the disintegration of the image to reflect on the impossibility for the viewer to truly decode an image, to one of the portraits on canvas by Michele Bellini, tributes to friends and acquaintances, in which an intimate style and a traditionally figurative language predominate; from the video installation by Aleksandra Cuzba, which explores the theme of gender identity and the complex relationship between male and female, to the sense of restlessness and disorientation evoked by the images of Angelo Di Bello, for a reflection on the distorted world of information, big data and the digital. More painting with the abstract maps of Luca Di Luzio, whose imaginary worlds intersect, inscribed on the rough canvas, leading nowhere and to no time; and then with the ink on paper of Lorenzo Modica, who transforms a familiar object, such as an anonymous bead curtain, into a symbol of violence, closure and separation.