Preparations are underway in Bologna for the upcoming Arte Fiera (7-9 February 2025), during which the city is always animated by a swarming of exhibition proposals in public and private spaces, some of which are normally closed to the public or not devoted to art. From 6 to 16 February 2025, ART CITY Bologna, the program of exhibitions and events promoted by the Municipality of Bologna, in collaboration with BolognaFiere under the artistic direction of Lorenzo Balbi, will return for its thirteenth edition. The novelty this year is that the program of institutional initiatives will have widespread distribution in all the civic museums and above all a longer duration, to allow the public to schedule visits without having to concentrate them in the space of a few days.
Alessandro Roma, “Vestirsi paesaggio”, installation view at Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, hall 1, ph. M. Montesano, courtesy of the artist
The city festival of contemporary art is already started with Alessandro Roma’s exhibition, recently inaugurated at Palazzo Ghisilardi Fava, which hosts the Museo Civico Medievale. After having lived in Milan, London and Brussels, the artist has chosen Faenza (Ravenna) as his home since 2020, driven by his growing interest in ceramics and a sort of “existential” tiredness – as he tells in an interview with Lorenzo Balbi – in open contrast to the stereotype that large centres are the privileged places of creative elaboration. After a solo exhibition in 2023 at CAR Gallery (his reference gallery in the city) and the awarding of the Alinovi – Daolio Prize by the Academy of Fine Arts in the same year, Alessandro Roma returns to Bologna with a prestigious institutional exhibition, in which he presents a series of new pictorial and sculptural works specifically conceived for the spaces of the museum in dialogue with its collections.
Alessandro Roma, “Vestirsi paesaggio”, installation view at Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, hall 1 and 4, ph. M. Montesano, courtesy of the artist
The exhibition itinerary unfolds in five halls spread across the three floors of the museum, carefully selected by the artist after dozens of visits animated by the intent to be formally influenced by the precious artefacts preserved there. The reflection that arose from these visits, which has become the guiding idea of the new works, is the need for a “total gaze” aimed at the art history as a whole that, bypassing the conventional fragmentations of the necessary historical periodization, reactivates the living and rhizomatic character even of works created in eras very distant from our own. The museum’s suggestion for Alessandro Roma, therefore, is that art is one and proceeds without fractures in a synchronic budding of lines and forms that graft one onto the other (in both a spatial and temporal meaning) in an almost self-generative process prompted by the infinite variations of an archetypal starting vocabulary. Always fascinated by decoration and the ritual repetitiveness of the gesture that supports its pervasive vocation by interpreting it as continuous writing, he chooses to keep his distance from the symbolic, narrative and iconographic influence of the collections to seek a rigorously formal stimulus in the interaction with ancient objects, to the point of also assuming the figurative elements as decoration and as pattern. The title of the exhibition, “Vestirsi paesaggio” (Dressing landscape), in addition to alluding to the two wearable pictorial sculptures exhibited (a recent direction of his creative experimentation), expresses the attitude to incorporation underlying this type of research, fully aimed at promoting an experience that, through artistic creation, delves into the personal sphere.
Alessandro Roma, “Vestirsi paesaggio”, installation view at Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, hall 2, ph. M. Montesano, courtesy of the artist
The two sculptural installations, supported by internal iron structures by virtue of which they acquire a recognizable anthropomorphic measure of painted fabric from the “Dressing landscape” series are a direct emanation of this intention. The first one we encounter in the exhibition appears at first sight as a mysterious landscape with a vaguely oriental influence, in which calibrated discolorations made with bleach cause a composition of atmospheric, vegetal and animal motifs to emerge from a brown background. Although they cannot be logically traced back to a unitary image, they evoke an immersive and coherent setting that caresses the “tactile” sensibilities of the gaze. What interests the artist in this creative process by way of removal is that the forms appear deferred as the acid acts on the basic tone, leaving the painting total freedom to expand without being led by thought or conditioned by the progression of the image in its making.
Alessandro Roma, “Vestirsi paesaggio”, installation view at Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, hall 3, ph. M. Montesano, courtesy of the artist
If in this work the wearable nature is revealed only in hindsight, thanks to the clue of the “necklace” of ceramic “eyes” that we discover on the opposite side, in the second sculpture the kimono cut appears immediately evident, in open comparison with the cope embroidered in opus anglicanum with stories of the life of Christ and the Virgin in front of it. Here the design becomes more gestural and insistent, reproducing an idea of texture in its filaments of color superimposed in transparency. Also in this case we find the insertion of ceramic details, an evidence to the artist’s intention to develop a language capable of increasingly fusing the two techniques in a pictorial continuum. In this static placement the two works are arranged to allow the maximum superficial expansion of the painting, but the project is to have them worn and used for performative actions that will confer three-dimensionality, depth and new facets to the image.
Alessandro Roma, “Vestirsi paesaggio”, installation view at Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, hall 3, ph. M. Montesano, courtesy of the artist
The painter’s approach, namely the habit of considering space in terms of the arrangement of shapes and colors, also leads Alessandro Roma when he works with clay, as it can be seen in the sculptures from the “Mask” series, also positioned among the artefacts of the museum’s collection in such a way as to recall them through studied chromatic and morphological assonances. The intuition from which these works arise is that of extrapolating a portion of nature/landscape to transform it into an integrated whole, alluding to an idea of a head that dialogues at a distance with the clothes, of which they constitute the visual completion (and also interchangeable, given the greater number of heads compared to bodies), even if unlike the latter they are not physically wearable. These vaguely cylindrical shapes are animated on the outside by crests modeled by the dowsing automatisms of the gestures with which the artist models the clay in such a way as to construct spontaneous forms that, the more you look at them, the more they resemble eyes, ears, leaves, snakes or bark pieces. These recurrences, already present for some time in his creative vocabulary, are not the result of a precise figurative intention, but of an introjection of naturalistic motifs intended as an abstract matrix, to which are added suggestions coming from the artefacts from the permanent collection.
Alessandro Roma, “Vestirsi paesaggio”, installation view at Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, hall 3 and 5, ph. M. Montesano, courtesy of the artist
In this sense, therefore, the dialogue with the museum shuns didactic knowledge to revive a heritage of forms already active and latent in his (and our) imagination. The eyes, ears and foliage mentioned above therefore seem to pass seamlessly into the Gothic edges of the draperies of the museum’s sculptures, into the ornaments of the medieval bas-reliefs or into certain details of the clothes of the characters sculpted in stone by the ancient stonemason masters, who in their time and perhaps without being precisely aware of it, had based their production on a similar process. Equally precious is the chromatic component of the sculptures, which competes with the brightness of the enamels and medieval glass pastes thanks to the specific firing process used, called “reduction” and aimed at enhancing the brilliance of the ferrous components of the ceramic pigments. A real surprise are the interiors of the sculptures, accessible to the gaze through perforations or actual tears in those closed structures, whose smooth surface becomes a further pictorial field, protected like a sort of cave of wonders, where the final transformation of the landscape into mask and nature takes place.
Info:
Alessandro Roma. Vestirsi paesaggio
13/12/2024 – 2/03/2025
Museo civico medievale
Via Manzoni, 4 – Bologna
www.museibologna.it/medievale
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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