CAR Gallery is pleased to announce Il tutto per non traballare troppo the first solo exhibition in the gallery by Alessandro Roma (Milan, 1977) which presents for the occasion some large canvases painted on fabric, some recently produced ceramic works and a site-specific wall painting. The selection of works on display highlights the artist's integrated approach to different media, each of which, explored in depth in its specificities, is complementary to the others in witnessing a research that starts from the sign to become a three-dimensional construction in a potential infinite expansion on an environmental scale.
«The main area on which his research has focused in recent years is the relationship between man and nature, understood both as his personal imaginative approach to a matter that he perceives as the sign of otherness, and as an attempt to confront the internal mechanisms of transformation and structuring of natural elements through the mediation of an articulated visual vocabulary that, instead of becoming a superstructure, fulfills the function of catalyzing a rediscovered spontaneous expression. Landscape, decoration, craftsmanship and painting are the categories within which his artistic practice moves, courageously heedless of the suspicion of marginality with which the first three are viewed in this age, as well as of the risk, inherent in the last, of venturing into a period of equivocal hyper-production not always motivated by a real need to exist. Roma’s discourse on nature seeps between the lines, or rather between the crevasses, of a mental space conceived as a place of artifice, from which the artist chooses to try to understand the visible. (…) The artist’s search is one for relationships that can untangle the complexity of reality by implementing an adherent mimesis of its hidden mechanisms of formation, that applied to painting restore the synthesis of an object of thought destined to remain rationally elusive, but now approachable through empathic approximations. On the one hand, this approach borrows from Art Nouveau the aptitude for deriving ornamental and dynamic lines from the observation of (even microscopic) manifestations of natural vitalism, the recovery of the symbolic universe connected to them and the propensity to touch the limits of applied art. On the other hand, Alessandro Roma’s work is by no means aimed at the elaboration of a vocabulary of cataloged floral and zoomorphic motifs with which to shape an ideal habitat, but on the contrary, to the understanding of a mysterious otherness, impossible for him to approach directly, through the introjection in the form of signs and color of its potential for regeneration and transformation».
Extract from the essay Alessandro Roma. Natura sive artificium by Emanuela Zanon in the exhibition catalogue Se si cerca l’infinito, basta chiudere gli occhi, MEF - Museo Ettore Fico, Turin 2023
The organs del paesaggio 2023, tempera, spary colour, acrylic on fabric and ceramic, 290 x 160 cm (front)
The eyes of the moon 2023, glazed ceramic, painted fabric lampshade, 183 x 40 cm (left)
A cold white luce 2021-22, tempera, spray colour, acrylic on fabric and ceramic, 264 x 154 cm
Mask 2021, ceramic, iron pedestal, 133 x 35 x 20 cm (detail)
Il respiro of the trees 2021, tempera, spray colour, acrylic on fabric and ceramic, 260 x 104 cm
Threshold 2021-22, tempera, spray colour, acrylic on fabric and ceramic, 264 x 154 cm
The light of the night 2022, glazed ceramic, 38 x 28 cm
In the world of the moon 2022, glazed ceramic, 37 x 30 cm
