One of the most interesting Italian artists on the Italian scene, active since the 1970s, Lucia Romualdi has created a specially designed work for the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. “platea 2019”, with its installation made of dense darkness and geometric writings, has totally reinvented the spaces of the Colleoni Hall, in the spirit of abstract, conceptual and at the same time poetic suggestions.
Between light projections, video appearances and essential signs, named after the cyclical temporality of the circle, the installation marks the environment, leaving in the background the image of the sea, the rhythmic movement of the tides, the concepts of eternity and transformation of matter, the historical memory of the Port of Ripetta and the cinematic memory of a boat trip, completely transfigured. Visions, but also enigmatic sounds, for a work that has always given the musical element a central role: it is precisely a fragment of the 1895 black and white film, Barque sortant du port (Leaving the Harbour), reworked by the artist, that establishes a dialogue with the sound of the Morse reading of the tide tables for the port of Kamsar, in Guinea.
Romualdi, who has always been inclined towards multimedia and reflection on space-time forms, pursues a refined synthesis between visual art, music, philosophy and mathematics. A substantial part of her research focuses on historical experimental cinematography: old films transformed, rethought as creative raw material and reduced to elementary visual symbols, also making use of procedures typical of film editing.
The curator, Lýdia Pribišová, explains: “The central idea of Lucia Romualdi’s work is the movement of the sea, the encounter of this element with human existence. (…) In her poetics, we can recognise a precise, profound and rigorous, even enigmatic, line of research. Her works follow a harmony inspired by a combinatorial criterion, a particular encounter between soul and precision, a process similar to musical composition.”.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the entire Documentary Archive of Lucia Romualdi runs on a monitor in the space in front of the exhibition hall.
The exhibition is held in collaboration with Studio Trisorio and Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon.
Lucia Romualdi, “platea 2019”
Academy of Fine Arts in Rome | Colleoni Hall, Via di Ripetta 222
14-25 March 2019
Opening hours: Monday to Saturday, 10 am-6 pm. Free admission
***
Since the 1980s, Lucia Romualdi has collaborated with the composer Franco Donatoni and with other contemporary composers and musicians, including Ivan Fedele, Fausto Sebastiani, Riccardo Giagni, Antonio Ballista, Bruno Canino, Stefano Cardi, Claudio Iacomucci and Francesco De Gregori.
Her projects have been exhibited in various public spaces with a strong historical and monumental connotation, from the Aquarium Neapolitanum (1977) to the Astronomical Observatory in Rome (1998), from Castel dell’Ovo in Naples (2003) to the Šamorín Synagogue in Slovakia (2010), from the Andersen Museum in Rome (2010) to the Maschio del Forte Michelangelo in Civitavecchia (2013), as well as in prestigious contemporary art museums, from the MuHKA Museum in Antwerp in 2002 to the MAXXI in Rome in 2016.