In the heart of Pigneto, a Roman neighborhood that continues to pulse with underground artistic life, STUDIO DFB hosts “Nuvolaglia”, a dialogue between Fosco and Sirio Bertani, curated by Mattia Andres Lombardo, and open by appointment. The gallery, always a catalyst for lateral visions, once again proves to be a space where subculture finds its voice, where artistic experiences escape the hierarchies imposed by the market and emerge in their most authentic and radical form. Here, far from the spotlight of institutional recognition, gateways to new imaginaries are opened.
Fosco Bertani – Sirio Bertani, Nuvolaglia, Vernissage, 2025, © Irene Guerrini
Sirio Bertani, son of Fosco, becomes both mediator and co-author of an intergenerational dialogue through a pictorial and graphic gesture that is, at once, continuation, interpretation, and rewriting. The eleven works on display stem from Sirio’s previous creations, but are adapted and superimposed onto Fosco’s oil paintings: the layered and dense pictorial material evokes primordial landscapes and geological memories, transformed and reinterpreted by Sirio’s intervention with ink and graphite. The result is a visual short-circuit between two sensibilities chasing one another: the solidity of the father’s painting is fractured and dissolved in the whirlwind of the son’s nervous and visionary markings.
Left: Fosco Bertani – Sirio Bertani, “Giogo apuano”, 2025. Painting, oil on canvas board, drawing, ink and graphite on paper, © Thomas Cian. Photo on the right: Fosco Bertani – Sirio Bertani, “Fiorisce l’eringio”, 2025. Painting, oil on canvas board, drawing, ink and graphite on paper, © Thomas Cian
Sirio’s practice is reminiscent, in some ways, of artists like William Kentridge, with his layered drawings and memory work, or the imaginative approach of Max Ernst, who explored the metamorphism of painterly matter using techniques like frottage. But while Kentridge was more interested in the fluidity of memory and history, and Ernst sought out chance in the texture of surfaces, Sirio performs an almost shamanic act: he reads, deciphers, and translates. Fosco’s oil becomes the terrain for a drift of signs that does not merely describe but evokes, transfigures, embodies other possible forms. Observing “Fiorisce l’eringio”, one of the exhibited works, one feels as though the landscape is being drawn upward by an ascensional current, as if the painting were a field of geological and atmospheric tensions in perpetual motion. “Ferrata di nuvole”, on the other hand, plays with a paradox: solidity becomes evanescent, the mountain dematerializes into a network of signs reminiscent of ancient engravings or Renaissance studies on the world’s morphology. The mountain, a symbol of immovability, becomes an unstable organism, a palimpsest of potential narratives.
Left: Fosco Bertani – Sirio Bertani, “Ferrata di nuvole”, 2025. Painting, oil on canvas board, drawing, ink and graphite on paper, © Thomas Cian. Right: Fosco Bertani – Sirio Bertani, “Razzolare tra i cirri”, 2025. Painting, oil on canvas board, drawing, ink and graphite on paper, © Thomas Cian
And then there’s “Razzolare tra i cirri”, an emblematic piece that seems to encapsulate the entire poetics of the exhibition. Here, the graphic sign slips between brushstrokes like a light wind, tracing lines that suggest imaginary paths through a sky in transformation. The work thus becomes a sort of meteorological atlas of thought, where each mark is a movement, an intuition, a flight through the vapors of creation. More than an exhibition, “Nuvolaglia” is an experiment in expanded temporality, where the pictorial past opens up to infinite possibilities of rewriting. The artwork is never finished but remains in a state of constant mutation, like the clouds from which it takes its name: elusive, changeable, capable of containing entire worlds within themselves. And in this dialogue between father and son, between painting and drawing, between matter and dream, the nature of art is somehow revealed: a continuous passing of the baton, an eternal metamorphosis.
Francesca M.
Info:
Fosco and Sirio Bertani. NUVOLAGLIA
Curated by Mattia Andres Lombardo
07/03/2025 – 11/04/2025
Studio DFB
Via Montecuccoli 28/A, Rome
instagram.com/studiodfb
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