Alessandro Roma:
A Vivid Dream: Can dreaming save us?
13th September – 7th December 2017
Leaving, getting lost, gathering and getting lost again.
The ‘Posture of Reverie’, as Alessandro Roma loves to refer to, allows us to grasp what we cannot recognise immediately, by taking leaps and jumps, side paths of vision and free associations.
This can lead us to generous experiences, rich as unexpected discoveries offering us a special heuristic opening, without the need of validating what we had speculated about.
In this exhibition the body tells, abdicates and then returns, in an unceasing waving movement.
Emergences and disappearances of evanescent images, in a never predictable register, are the living substance of Alessandro Roma’s research. In his process of artistic creation the mind is a web but the body is an anchor in the course of an obscure and dreamlike voyage to a ‘know-not-where’.
The physical root is firm.
The road the visitor can take, as the artist hopes, follows his process of work creation.
Look and touch explore the surface of his paintings and fabrics with their rich textures as they do with the play on empty spaces and full shapes of the materials employed to create his vases, bas-reliefs. Our hands can slide among the pages of his synchronic storytelling, lying on big books, while our eyes take anarchic visual leaps.
The substance leads us inside, in order to discover unknown assonances: it can lead us to blindness or revelation at the same time.
The light encloses the colours, which are never stable and well-defined, and keeps us suspended for all the time we want.
Mimesis of the mind, not of the shape.
Marina Dacci
About the exhibition
Roma’s pictorial approach is anchored in his training as a painter. In recent years the artist has delved into different techniques, exploring castings, printing on fabrics, ceramics and collage. His new repertoire of inner landscapes, arising from both real experiences and literary sources, has brought a depth in his work turning his inner universe into something tangible and directly accessible to the viewer.
The exhibition’s aim is not so much to assemble and showcase the artist’s technical mastery of each media, but rather fostering the organic vision of his research. His bronze or plaster bas-reliefs appear through the flimsiness of silk fabrics; coloured ceramic vases strike a dialogue with vividly painted canvasses and the visual narratives of his artist’s books, each made in a unique copy. Each forms an important part of his “dreamy” universe, while being strongly anchored in our perceivable experience, as also stated by the exhibition’s curator.