Is this the first or last night on our planet? Lulù Nuti (1988) studied painting to find herself a sculptor and Delfina Scarpa (1993) studied sculpture before discovering herself as a painter. Two young artists among the protagonists of the emerging Roman scene. A two-person show – curated by Teodora di Robilant – in which two inverse and complementary paths are confronted, poised between ut pictura poesis and ut scultura poesis, until 30 April in the setting of the Alessandra Bonomo Gallery in via del Gesù in Rome.

A door opens onto the hidden wonders of a Roman courtyard. You cross a piece of history to get to the heart of a plastic and pictorial dialogue on the contemporary. From the historical and Renaissance space of the ‘outside’, we move on to the immaculate and contemporary space of the Gallery, redesigned according to the ahistorical and timeless schemes of Nuti and Scarpa’s ‘artistic feeling’. A powerful comparison on what the world is and the memory of it, with strokes of cement, plaster, plasticine, acrylics and iridescent colors. A primordial and apocalyptic scenario at the same time, to be experienced, crossed, leaving the trace of our passage as traces of passage and memory are the works of the artists. Nuti’s sculptures and Scarpa’s canvases are the result of deep, intimate and highly personal research carried out during the pandemic year and designed specifically for the Bonomo spaces.

The plastic forms of Lulu change and reborn from their own shell of matter, assuming the appearance now of fossil shells of primitive seabeds, now of cement strips of flags, echoes of conquests that have destroyed the world. Cement and plaster have chameleonic plastic qualities and are able to tell both the story of their creation and the history and references they hide, in a continuous reference of visible and invisible (such as the impact of cement on the ecosystem for example).

Delfina’s canvases are fragments of landscapes, memories, emotions which, as if filtered by the blurred and dreamlike lens of the colorful world of childhood, are vibrant and powerful in their expressive urgency. ‘They reveal geographies and portraits of landscapes’ – to say it with Theodora of Robilant -, similar to oversized and superhistorical ‘non-places’. They are the nuanced and evanescent traces of intimate and personal paths. Delfina lives her canvas, her creation, her colors; her feeling is the impatient act of a little girl who, using her hands to spread and mix colors and ideas, reshapes the world and the intimate memory of it. She spreads layers of acrylic and water to give shape to habitual paths, to the evocative and timeless imagery that she belongs to without trying to repeat the visible but, as Paul Klee argued, making the invisible visible.

The viewer who leaves the gallery is left with a sense of strangeness and the question returns: is this the first or last night on our planet?

Arianna Olivari

Info:

NUTI.SCARPA
LULÙ.DELFINA
Until April 30, 2021

Galleria Alessandra Bonomo
via Del Gesù 62 Roma