There’s a moment in every man’s life when a question too big to fit inside a single head emerges. One of those questions that makes the foundations of certainties tremble, and if you say it out loud you feel stupid, but also finally true. Like: What if the Œuvre Absolue really existed? In Rome, on a street where buildings mock time and art has found its home within the Nicola Del Roscio Foundation, this question has taken concrete form under the name Megalomanie, the new exhibition signed by CANEMORTO, with the visionary complicity of Davide Pellicciari and Carlotta Spinelli.
CANEMORTO, “Megalomanie”, installation view at Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
A project that is not an exhibition, not a film, not a performance. It’s all of this. It’s CANEMORTO’s declaration of war against art itself. It’s yet another theatrical coup by those who for almost twenty years have been spitting in the face of identity to reinvent themselves each time from scratch, never signing anything with their own name. Masks on their faces, invented idiom, delirious cult for a canine deity named Txakurra – if this seems too much, know that you’re only at the beginning. The trio appears on stage as a single entity, like a Leviathan that paints, sculpts, writes, screams and hides in one body and three mad souls. They are the absolute protagonists of the Project Room, the rebellious and mutant space of the Foundation that since 2019 has been moving like a cultural virus inside and outside its own walls. A laboratory-room, a free container where art gets its hands dirty and ideas bounce like pinball balls. The beating heart of the project is the film – written and performed by CANEMORTO, directed by Marco Proserpio, with music by Matteo Pansana – making its Italian premiere.
CANEMORTO, “Megalomanie”, installation view at Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
The film is a journey to the borders of reason and beyond, an alchemical attempt to find the legendary Œuvre Absolue, the definitive work, capable of pleasing everyone, everywhere. To do this, the trio goes so far as to desecrate tombs, explore Villa Arson in Nice, and force the limits of narration itself. The result? A lysergic race in which the real protagonist is desire – absolute, childish, irrepressible – to leave an eternal mark. Before the screening, a surreal encounter: CANEMORTO expresses themselves in their mysterious idiom, while Giulia Gaibisso, a specialized interpreter, translates in real time. More than an introduction, an initiation rite. The spectator, like a novice, thus enters the world of Txakurra and its masked apostles.
CANEMORTO, “Megalomanie”, installation view at Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
The exhibition continues in the spirit of exaggeration. And what’s more exaggerated than a Guinness World Record? CANEMORTO aims straight for it, creating the largest chalcographic prints on the planet. They produce them, live them, film them. They document everything in a short film that becomes an integral part of the exhibition. It’s not just about art: it’s a battle of will, an obsession that becomes matter. Because this is what CANEMORTO does: creates a universe where every work is a new chapter of a grotesque and theatrical saga, in which the protagonists are themselves, always disguised, always struggling between the desperate need for success and loyalty to an imaginary religion.
CANEMORTO, “Megalomanie”, installation view at Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
It’s art that mocks art, it’s narrative that becomes sculpture, it’s organized delirium. It’s a successful scam, or perhaps the most sincere gesture one can make today in the world of galleries and press releases. From New York to Hong Kong, from Berlin to Grottaglie, CANEMORTO has scattered its artistic relics in the secular temples of contemporary art. But it’s here, in Rome, that the circle closes – or opens, like in every good story that doesn’t want to end. Upon leaving, while the chatter of visitors mingles with the distant rumble of Roman traffic, a clear sensation remains: CANEMORTO doesn’t ask you to understand. It asks you to enter. To participate. To let yourself be possessed, at least for a moment, by the unreasonable logic of megalomania. Because sometimes it’s only in delirium that truth makes room for itself.
Info:
CANEMORTO. Megalomanie
9/05/2025 – 18/07/2025
Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
Via Francesco Crispi, 18 – Roma
www.fondazionenicoladelroscio.it
Independent artist and curator. Founder of No Title Gallery in 2011. I observe, study, ask questions, take informations and live in contemporary art, a real stimulus for my research.
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