The CAR Gallery in Bologna recently presented the new Alessandro Roma’s exhibition (Milan, 1977). Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, the artist has always worked with painting and collage, then moving towards experimentation of new techniques closer to the field of sculpture and applied arts: ceramic manufacturing, then combined with the application of glazes.
Alessandro Roma, Il tutto per non traballare troppo, exhibition view, courtesy CAR Gallery
Crossing the gallery entrance, the spectator is immediately transported into the animated vegetal world that Roma imagines and reinterprets, giving the viewer the vision of a blurred universe that resides beyond, over a curtain that the artist invites us to cross. He also intervened on some walls of the exhibition space, as if to prepare a suitable environment to welcome his works, and then – of course – the spectator. Il tutto per non traballare troppo, is made of four large vertical canvases of introductory value and exemplifying Alessandro Roma’s vision of the world: some anecdotal details – a leaf or a peacock, an animal symbol of resurrection and eternal life – act as an ideal guide, as a guide within an inner world where the animal and vegetal kingdoms merge in an overall embrace.
Alessandro Roma, The eyes of the moon, 2023, glazed ceramic, painted fabric lampshade and The organs del paesaggio, 2023, tempera, acrylic, spray paint on fabric, ceramic, courtesy CAR Gallery
It is not nature in its chthonic, brutal and subterranean essence to be the protagonist of these paintings; if anything, it is a benign nature, fertile and luxuriant, promising, and welcoming. In front of these paintings, the luminous and brilliant strength of the backgrounds – certainly aware of the chromatic lesson of the Nabis group and Henri Matisse – is an invitation to life, to free expressiveness. It is though an artificial nature, where the anecdotal data is swallowed up by the succession of sinuous and waving shapes, the result of the artist’s imaginative work. Anyway, the perspective that Roma gives to the spectator also concerns the relationship between Man and otherness-nature.
Alessandro Roma, A cold white luce, 2021-2022, tempera, acrylic, spray paint on fabric, ceramic, courtesy CAR Gallery
The dialogue continues through a level of comparison, where his work tears apart the bidimensionality of the canvases – significantly hooked to the wall by ceramic arboreal joints – to reach the sculptural form. In front of Mask (2021) – a ceramic sculpture that marks the passage from one to the other room of the gallery – the plant rows held in pictorial linearism, often close to certain assumptions of Art Nouveau, here explode in sculptural form: in the intersected plot of this internal ramification, between full and empty spaces, Roma brings us here in front of an internal world more chaotic and disordered than the one depicted in his canvases. In the huge Thresold (2021-2022) – in a continuous dialogue with the theme of access, the discovery of another world, the crossing of a threshold – the contact with the floreal style of the artistic world from the late nineteenth century is even more evident: the formalization of nature, the abduction of the organic and its rebirth in the applied arts, as The eyes of the moons (2023) shows us here, demonstrating the wide range of experimentalism practiced by Roma.
Alessandro Roma, Il tutto per non traballare troppo, exhibition view, courtesy CAR Gallery
The most brutal and overwhelming impact paradoxically occurs with the least imposing work in terms of size, but no less significant: In the world of the moon (2022), a small glazed ceramic tablet. The artist’s cognitive urgency finds free expression in a new artistic technique: just like Roma, the fiery nature of this lunar landscape also frees itself from the linear form, exploding in the brilliant polychromic typical of the glaze. It is the nucleus of an elusive and perpetually changing world.
Daria Ortolani
Info:
Alessandro Roma, Il tutto per non traballare troppo
23/09/2023 – 4/11/2023
CAR Gallery
Via Azzo Gardino, 14/a – Bologna
https://www.cardrde.com/exhibitions/il-tutto-per-non-traballare-troppo
Graduated in medieval art history at the Bologna Alma Mater Studiorum, she collaborates with the magazine by writing about contemporary art, with a careful eye on sculpture and photography.
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