The second appointment of Visionarea Art Space’s new season began on October 6th with the exhibition of photographer, painter, set and costume designer – included in the BBC documentary “The Genius of Photography” – Paolo Ventura. From October 7th to January 20th, exclusively and in a first preview for the art gallery of the Auditorium della Conciliazione, 21 acrylic-on-paper creations that accompany the artist’s autobiography will be exhibited to the public, along with 11 photos from his Ex-Voto cycle.
VISIONAREA Art Space – with the invaluable support of Fondazione Cultura e Arte, an instrumental body of Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale, chaired by Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele – continues its mission: to bring the excellence of internationally-renowned Italian Contemporary Art and Photography to the public’s attention, with a program that this year focuses on photography and its multiple facets.
After its inauguration with Massimo Vitali (January 7th to 20th), the renovated space of the Auditorium della Conciliazione sets its spotlight on an experimenter of languages whose research over the years has remained faithful to his mood and themes: war and soldiers, circuses and masks, landscapes and seas, cities and its suburbs, following the circular wave of a memory that constructs narrative lines in two dimensions.
Between poetry and life, like the project presented at Visionarea: a narrative current that stems from the book, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN IMPOSTOR (Johan & Levi), where the life of the artist (narrated by Laura Leonelli) embodies a micro-epic Calvinian mechanism of daily life in reverse. In 21 unique and impactful works, we discover close and distant relatives, adherent and inherent places, situations of life in Milan and summer holidays, family duties and the rights of adolescents, slippery but vivid memories of a mind that traverses the past through a lens that hypnotizes recollections, creating a postcard from the future with roots in the heart of the 20th century.
The additional 11 pieces are from Paolo Ventura’s Ex-Voto works. Rarely has war been narrated with such an awareness of pain. Here, we do not see the actions but the consequences in the eyes, relapse in the gazes, as if every soldier were contemplating where the platitude of evil begins and ends.
Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele, President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale, commented: “Paolo Ventura’s works are profoundly narrative, whether they materialize in drawings or explode in photography. They are a story, with a beginning and an end, and a development in the middle, not infrequently accompanied by short texts. In his works, we also recognize an aesthetic nostalgia for the past that makes this artistic and photographic cycle absolutely evocative. Autobiografica (con ex-voto) is an exhibition that, through its theatrical tone (not surprisingly, since the artist is also a well-known set designer), fits perfectly within the new museum-like exhibition space, overlooking Castel Sant’Angelo, which I strongly desired.”
Paolo Ventura was born in 1968. He is a constructor of worlds, an experimenter of languages, an investigator of the relational system between bodies and spaces, inventing forms and rules that make his figurative universe unique and extremely recognizable. A fashion photographer in New York, he also explored staged photography, and later began to create new visions and new works.
Artist: PAOLO VENTURA
Title: Autobiografica (with ex-voto)
Curator: Gianluca Marziani
Dates: October 7th, 2021 to January 20th, 2021 - Rome
Opening: Wednesday, October 6th - 6 pm to 9 pm
Location: VISIONAREA Art Space - Auditorium della Conciliazione
Address: Piazza Pia, 1 - Rome
Tickets: Free admission
E-mail: info@visionarea.org
Website: http://www.visionarea.org
Free Admission – RESERVATION REQUIRED
