LONDON.- Leaving, getting lost, gathering and getting lost again.
The ‘Posture of Reverie’, as Alessandro Roma loves to refer to, allows us to grasp what we cannot recognise immediately, by taking leaps and jumps, side paths of vision and free associations.
This can lead us to generous experiences, rich as unexpected discoveries offering us a special heuristic opening, without the need of validating what we had speculated about.
In this exhibition the body tells, abdicates and then returns, in an unceasing waving movement.
Emergences and disappearances of evanescent images, in a never predictable register, are the living substance of Alessandro Roma’s research. In his process of artistic creation the mind is a web but the body is an anchor in the course of an obscure and dreamlike voyage to a ‘knownot-where’.
The physical root is firm.
The road the visitor can take, as the artist hopes, follows his process of work creation.
Look and touch explore the surface of his paintings and fabrics with their rich textures as they do with the play on empty spaces and full shapes of the materials employed to create his vases, bas-reliefs. Our hands can slide among the pages of his synchronic storytelling, lying on big books, while our eyes take anarchic visual leaps.
The substance leads us inside, in order to discover unknown assonances: it can lead us to blindness or revelation at the same time.
The light encloses the colours, which are never stable and well-defined, and keeps us suspended for all the time we want.
Mimesis of the mind, not of the shape.
Alessandro Roma (Milan, 1977)
After living for some years in London, Roma now lives and works in Milan.
Roma’s unwavering pictorial approach is anchored in his formal training and years as a painter. In recent years the artist has delved into different techniques, exploring castings, printing on fabrics, ceramics and collage. His new repertoire of inner landscapes, arising from both real experiences and literary sources, has brought a depth to his oeuvre, turning his imagined universe into something tangible and directly accessible to the viewer.
Roma studied at the Accademia di Brera, Milan and was later invited for a residency at Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Germany. In 2007 he participated in the IV International Painting Prize, Diputación de Castellón, Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón.
Roma’s work has been shown in international museums and galleries among which are Prague Biennal (2009), the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto with the solo show Humus (2011).
Selected solo exhibitions include MIC International Museum of Ceramics, Faenza (Italy) curated by I. Biolchini (2018), Museum Casa Jorn (Italy) curated by L. Bochicchio Albisola (2018), A Vivid Dream, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London, curated by M. Dacci (2017), Swamp, Villa Croce Museum, Genoa, (2016); One foot in the world and the other in the stillness, Z2o Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome (2016); Solo show, Coburn project, London (2015); Locus amoenus, Sobering gallery, Paris (2014), Organizzazione organica di forme, Mac, Contemporary art Museum, Lissone (2014); Enclosure, Paradise Row gallery, London (2013); Il sole mi costrinse ad abbandonare il giardino, Brand New Gallery, Milan (2012); Unfolding the Folds, Galerie Alexandra Saheb, Berlin (2011); Sites of action, Scaramouche gallery, New York (2011).
Among the recent group shows: Drawing Biennial, Rimini (2016, 2015); Drawing Room, London (2015); Everything is about to happen, Corvi-Mora, Greengrassi gallery, London/Artists Space New York, (2014); Estate, Marianne Boesky New York (2012); Never before a girl done so much with so little, curated by Lucie Fontaine, The Suburbans Gallery, Chicago (2012); Partita a quattro, una riflessione sulla scultura, Lorcan O’Neill Gallery, Rome (2012).
