Inauguration: 05 December 2019 from 19:00

Gallery: Contemporary art preview - Rome

edited by: Luigi Di Gioia

Critical text by Noemi Pittaluga

The colours of fairy tales: architectures of our dreams

At the origin of “once upon a time” there is the identity of man; the fabula which by etymology means story is the evolution of the myth, historical root of our intellectual maturation. Giancarlo Benedetti Corcos wanted to deal with this articulated theme to talk about the fairy tale, the dream and their mixture. It is no coincidence, in fact, that children are introduced to sleep with an oral narration in which the sounds of words become a lullaby, composed by concepts and  storytelling suggestions of the fairy tale that stimulates the imagination of the child, who dozes off with in mind images to be elaborated .

For the adult who reads before going to sleep, the process varies slightly, the voice of the parent or grandfather misses, but the eyes close immersed in the events of the story presented by the book. The coloured line drawing, a specific aspect of Giancarlino's works, becomes the means to express suggestions, born from the memory of the tales that made up his childhood background and his curiosity today.

The conceptual process that led the artist to compose this new cycle of pictorial works passes mentally from the long stories of Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, to the shorter Russian traditional flok tales and to the ancient morals of Aesop  arriving to Haiku aphorisms, capable in a few words of enclosing deep meanings. The works exposed become in this occasion, pages of a book that contains pregnant episodes of some fables (The Love for Three Oranges, Little Red Riding Hood, The "Town Musicians of Bremen", The golden fish, Ivan the fool, The golden bird), identified by the author as particularly significant. Moving between the paintings, the viewer builds his own narrative path by observing the illustrations of the relevant passages of the novellas in which the values ​​of our culture are identified. The gesture becomes a pictorial sign full of fantasy and energy and the typical figures drawn by the artist are always colourful and slender, but well recognizable. The new invented characters seem to float within the perimeter of the canvas that defines time and space of the setting. Giancarlino does not deny himself and once again with the spontaneity of his strokes proves that he has nothing to prove; frank, vital, volcanic, he communicates his imagination without filters with the strength of those who have been able to rework in a completely personal way those profound teachings of stories that accompany us throughout our lives. The author seems to suggest that if in the beginning there was the logos and in the middle of life the dark forest there is nothing left but to wait inexorably for the grand finale of they lived happily ever after.

Giancarlino Benedetti Corcos (known as Giancarlino) was born inRome, in 1954, where he lives and works. After graduating from the National Institute for Design, he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of La Sapienza where he attended Bruno Zevi's lessons. From time to time, an eclectic author chooses the support where to paint: ceramic, canvas, wood, paper, recycled materials, "sheets" which he hangs on the external wall of his studio interacting with passers-by. He accompanies his exhibitions with performances based on theatrical texts (“little comedies” written with Laura Rosso) or imaginary figures. He exhibited in Italy and abroad; among the numerous institutional venues and galleries we mention: the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the Giulia Gallery, the André Gallery, the Incontro Art Gallery in Rome, the Tornabuoni Gallery in Pietrasanta (LU), the Castello di Rivara - Contemporary Art Center by Franz Paludetto - Rivara (TO), the Usine de Rue Charlot in Paris and the Onishi Gallery in New York. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and at the Faculty of Architecture of Valle Giulia there is one of his ceramics entitled Rosso del Debbio, produced for the 40th anniversary of 1968. He created many of his works with Massimo Alessandrini (Easy Furniture) and Alberto Giuliani . Some wrote about his work: L. Rosso, A. Bonito Oliva, L. Cherubini, G. Marramao, L. Scialanga, M. Morellini E. Orsini, V. Sgarbi.

Noemi Pittaluga, born inGenoain 1985, graduated from the Sapienza University of Rome in the Specialized course in Knowledge and techniques of theatrical, cinematographic and digital language. After a Masters in museum and performance events curator of the IED, she is currently graduating from the Sapienza University of Rome in the master's course in art history. He published Introduction, in Mario Vidor, Roma Capitale, (Punto Marte edizioni, 2019), the essay An uncertain identity between life and death (Publishing and Entertainment, 2012) and the book Studio Azzurro. Theater (Contrasto, 2012); since 2010 she works as an independent art curator.

Inaugurazione: 21 Marzo 2019 dalle ore 19:00

Galleria: Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Roma

a cura di:  Luigi Di Gioia e Paolo Franzò

Testo critico di Noemi Pittaluga

Opening: 15 Novembre dalle ore 19:00

Gallery : Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Roma

By:  Luigi Di Gioia e Noemi Pittaluga

Testo critico di Noemi Pittaluga

With curious attention, the view approaches towards rarefied marine horizons, crystallized by the photo shoot of Mario Vidor. In silence, title of this series of landscapes, pushes the observer to come into contact with the image through an extended visual action. As in a cinematographic slow motion, the user seems to experience emotionally a spatio-temporal expansion that, inevitably, drags him into a new psychic and mental dimension. Similar to sacred and therefore auratic works (despite the reproducibility of the photographic medium), the works of Mario Vidor present themselves as laical icons to which we address our most urgent questions. The sea, the boats, the nets, the trees are the subjects shown by the artist who uses these elements as if they were moments of an inner meditation with which, sooner or later, everyone has to deal with. A profound manifestation of the author's intimate personality, his creations are the mirror of a totally atonic and purely iconic linguistic expression. Even maintaining a solid stylistic identity, Vidor is undoubtedly capable of interpreting indirectly different figurative situations in content and representation. The choice of an evanescent light, in the early hours of the morning, for the colour images and the skilful use of contrast of light and shadow for black and white images are the central idea and the evident mark of a well-established compositional paradigm. On tiptoes, the artist shows us a symbolic space, relegated to the thought that, here, can only be born in the quiet natural solitude. The more the scenery appears devoid of sounds - often symbolically muffled by the fresh snow - the more the reflection increases repeating, metaphorically, the constant noise of the brain gear, represented by the constant pealing sound of the sea flowing on the foreshore. And in this sort of ascetic fusion with a different space, the spectator - as the author himself at the time of choosing the subject to immortalize - can only immerse himself and be invaded by a new existential condition. It is no coincidence that the works, in which the human presence is almost completely absent, become a contemplative refuge offered to the public. A private locus amoenus in which, finally, the turbulent finds comfort in a spiritual and consolatory condition.

Noemi Pittaluga

Inaugurazione: 04 Maggio dalle ore 19:00

Galleria: Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Roma

a cura di:  Luigi Di Gioia e Giuseppe Ussani d'Escobar

Testo critico di Giuseppe Ussani d'Escobar

Piazza del Popolo

Angeli, Festa, Schifano

by

Giuseppe Ussani d’Escobar

It was the years of Romethat represented the center of the world, you could not even travel, sooner or later all those who counted: writers, artists, actors, singers and directors would cross Piazza del Popolo. A magical microcosm centered on his obelisk which attracted characters moving between reality and dream. Three young men would choose their kingdom in this wonderful corner of the EternalCity: Angeli, Festa and Schifano. Romewas in full swing, though rooted in its millennial history, the lights turned on, and night became day and came the desire to live, getting involved with the ascending euphoria; It was "the city that never sleeps", twinning ideally and emotionally with New Yorkand London. The advertisements and the signage of the streets penetrated the attentive and vivid sensitivity of the youngsters, as it happened previously in the States, and here are the first monochromes of Schifano, blunted in their contours as reversal films, filled with images of Coca Cola and Esso, brands that had entered our daily newspaper with the incisiveness of the characters of the ancient Roman gravestones that paraded through the Appian way, formulas of the new ritual of modernity, an invitation to consumerism for mass society. Schifano brings in these writings-images some drooling and drips, the icon-brand remains submissive despite the brilliance and apparent durability, of time wear. Angeli realizes the Half Dollar, the eagle is an unequivocal  symbol contaminated by rhetoric of power, but from the hands of the artist revives as an imperfect, incomplete phoenix, however powerful in its pictorial and visual characterization, recovering the immortality of the symbol. The urban profiles of our cities were irreparably changed, the suburbs had expanded, the Renaissance and Baroque historical centers suffered alterations and modifications, the spirit of modernity had also arrived to us with its attractive and hypnotic violence. Festa, with his series of "Squares of Italy", including "The Sforza Castle", evoked the ancient tradition of our architecture, invoking the humanistic memory in support and witnessing of our special cultural superiority in the European and international context. At the same time, its "Squares" are suspended and evanescent realities which reflect the surreal solidity and fragility of its appearances. In those years, a young man moved in the world of art and attended the Soligo Gallery, a place of encounters and emotions, of magical convergences, since nothing in this life is really accidental; the friendship with the gallery manager made him more and more passionate to Tano Festa, untill he would fall in love of one of the most beautiful works of this artist: "The Carnival - Tribute to Ensor". Ensor and Festa in this canvas meet perfectly, in a totality of harmony, intuitions and emotions. In the portraits of that time, Tano embodies his ghosts, the passionate desire to live in a bulimic orality of childhood: the faces of real people inspired by the masterpieces of literature and art, always preserve and denounce the identity of masks, puppets and dolls, that enter and exit the stage of his theater which is nothing more than Campo de 'Fiori; the Shakespearean artist-jester has thus built his "environment" in which he stages, between the conscious and the unconscious, his "happening" gratifying his self at the reaction of the participants-viewers. The masks, in Tano Festa and in James Ensor, possess the vital and explosive energy of the lowest and demonic instincts from which you would like to escape and at the same time serve to push away the fear of death by exorcising it. "Farewell to London" is the summary of Festa’s Universe: the unbuilt but painted window faces Trafalgar Square, the focusing is on Nelson’s column, then a detachment and a glimpse of a shoe and the umbrella of a man moving away from the pictorial surface, a hand emerges from nowhere to invade the scene with a masterful close-up and implies a greeting, the clouds on top skim in the sky. The space lives of overlapping and a movie develops vertically in a sequence of frames. Cinema, television and photography, the new means of reading and interpreting reality have enchanted the artists imagination. The beautiful "Palm", surrounded by bright and powerful colors, stands in its intense whiteness, and is almost the projection of a mirage that comes to us from the nostalgic memory of the distantLibya, Schifano’s native land which he will still remember in his tributes toLeptis Magna and starry skies. Angeli, Festa and Schifano are heirs and consumers of cultural images who extracted from the habitual context of everyday life by making them Pop and also Op and returning them to the force of the symbol.  The three life and adventures partners are borderline artists whose existence has become artwork itself; they were not afraid of death, with her they’ve lived in dreams, and for this reason they have never died, maybe they were never born, maybe they were just imagined, simply immortal characters of a movie that never ended.

Mario Vidor

La nuvola perfetta ( The Perfect Cloud )

11 novembre - 31 marzo 2017

Inaugurazione (alla presenza dell'artista): venerdì 11 novembre 2016, ore 19-22.00

Luigi Di Gioia is glad to present La nuvola perfetta, a personal exhibit of Mario Vidor edited by Noemi Pittaluga.

“The simplicity of beauty and the beauty of simplicity are undoubtedly the fundamental aspects present in all artistic projects by Mario Vidor. In the black and white photographs  of  The perfect cloud series, the author catches a rural landscape which detaches itself from its real referent to become an imaginative scenery. The ability to create, through an almost cinematic framing, a dreamlike world, and suspended in an air bubble confirming the artist's stylistic consistency. If, in fact, work in two colors provide human presence only in massive environments to give space mainly to natural elements (snow, marine, mountain and river landscapes), the works dedicated to the nude, show intricate shapes sculptures, composed by the intertwined bodies of man and woman.

The author’s artistic maturity is also evident in the photographs from reportage shades that offer European cities architecture and exotic views of distant lands. Vidor images, even having a pure iconographic essence, allow sound suggestions to the observer where silence is the protagonist. The muffled sound of the trampled snow, the relaxing one of the sea waves suggest the unknown acoustic effect of a hypothetical walk through steam mountains.The pursuit of perfection, which is inevitably subjective to the engine of the artist's visual intuitions, brings peaceful and serene achievement of this truth. In the pictures dedicated to the clouds, which often manifest a look upwards, is revealed  the  acceptance of life’s fate. The meteorological phenomenon of condensation of water becomes a kind of positive manifestation of conscience that invites the viewer to face daily problems  floating in the daily atmosphere always a few inches from the ground." Noemi Pittaluga.

Noemi Pittaluga: “Black and white photography is often associated with the sphere of memory, even in your poetry, is that so? " 

Mario Vidor: “Yes, it's true; The black and white generally refers to memory. If we consider the thought of Roland Barthes in La camera chiara, we cannot but confirm this peculiar role of photographic language. Visual memory, compared to the one linked to the other senses ( smell, hearing, tactile and taste), is certainly the most immediate, the most emotional for me, and the world of communication is a witness. Now we live in a society where image is constantly present: the medium from television has been just the beginning of a dialogue based on an exchange mainly iconic. Today, smartphones, internet, social networks confirm how data and information, use above all image to spread new messages in each field. But photography for me is not only and in a specific way memory. When I shoot I immortalize a real moment which then over time inevitably becomes a flashback, mainly intimist, which brings to light a sensation experienced  in a specific place and moment of my life. "

N. P. “What is the difference meaning between the colored landscapes and those in black and white? "

M. V. “For me, the technical use of black and white means to transform something, a landscape I invented from time to time. Consequently what I create is never a representation of a real setting. "

N. P. “They seem, in fact, places of serenity where to escape, to hide in a protected space full of peace; Is it not?”

M. V. “My photographs are a meditation on life. Of course mind being complex, there are different moods  represented in my works ".

N. P. “What is the element that stimulates your attention before shooting? What is it that drives you to choose a particular image of everyday life and transform it into an artistic picture? What is the emotion you feel in this encounter with the world?”

M. V. “The element that stimulates my attention before shooting is a reflection of something that I have in mind and I try to complete it. I try to find a feeling, a thought, an image, intended in a total sense, that would be important to send as a message and the emotion I feel is not with the world but with the photograph itself. "

Mario Vidor (Farra di Soligo 1948) dalle prime esperienze pittoriche negli anni Ottanta, sposta la sua ricerca sulla fotografia,  focalizzando l'attenzione in due direzioni: l'indagine storico-scientifica e il linguaggio creativo. Alla sua prima pubblicazione Sulle terre dei Longobardi (1989), sono seguiti diversi altri volumi di fotografia, e alcune singolari cartelle foto-litografiche. Ha vinto molti premi: nel maggio 2003 ha ricevuto il riconoscimento B.F.I. dalla FIAF e nel 2014 il riconoscimento A.F.I. Ha tenuto numerosissime mostre personali (oltre 290) nelle principali città italiane e all’estero (Francia, Germania, U.S.A., Repubblica Popolare Cinese, Croazia, Austria, Slovenia, Canada, Russia) dove le sue opere sono conservate in importanti collezioni di musei e gallerie.

Noemi Pittaluga (Genova 1985) Laureata e specializzata in Saperi e tecniche del linguaggio teatrale, cinematografico e digitale presso l'Università La Sapienza di Roma; dopo un Master in Curatore museale e di eventi performativi dello IED, si sta specializzando in Storia dell'arte presso l'Università La Sapienza di Roma. Ha pubblicato il saggio Un'identità incerta tra vita e morte (Editoria e Spettacolo, 2012) e il libro Studio Azzurro. Teatro (Contrasto, 2012); dal 2010 lavora come curatrice indipendente e presso la Galleria Gallerati di Roma.

Mario Vidor

La nuvola perfetta

A cura di Noemi Pittaluga

Anteprima d'arte contemporanea (Piazza Mazzini, 27 - 00195 Roma - Scala A, terzo piano - Tel. + 39 06.37500282 - Fax + 39 06.37353754)

Partnership: Galleria Gallerati

Inaugurazione: venerdì 11 novembre 2016, ore 19.00 - 22.00

Fino al 31 marzo

Orario: dal martedì al venerdì 15.30/19.00

Ufficio stampa: Anteprima d'arte contemporanea, Galleria Gallerati

Informazioni: \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , www.anteprimadartecontemporanea.it

Piazza Mazzini, 27 - 00195 Roma - Tel. + 39 06.37500282 - \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - www.anteprimadartecontemporanea.it

The exhibition will be extended untill March 30, 2016 
Gallery: Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio

The Political Landscape

For over twenty-five years  landscape photography represents the main interest of the research work of Olaf Otto Becker. It shows, in a particular way the visible traces of human over-population in abandoned areas; in which converges complexity of scientific, political and artistic nature analysis and has an ideological value(1).  The series Ilulissat and Broken Line are a reflection on human sensitivity and can be read as nature sentimental analysis whose primary common aspects are taken from painting of the XVIII and XIX centuries. However, this  subject  has not always occupied a respectable position in the history of art.

The impact on the romantic landscape given by Caspar David Friedrich has forged a particular aesthetic thought with his portrayals such as: 'The Sea of Ice (The Shipwreck of Hope)' of 1823, lining up an observation of nature deeply linked to an existential introspection and a precise imaginary.

The Arctic regions have become preponderant, thanks to the publication of William Bradford 'The Arctic Regions: Illustrated with Photographs Taken on an Art Expedition to Greenland', published in

London in 1873 by the famous Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle.

It was one of the most important photo books of the nineteenth century, some of the images were taken with a camera that had a negative dimension of about 46 to 30 centimeters.

The series  Ilulissat from Olaf Otto Becker is the result of his travels along the west coast of Greenland, not in a steamer for an expedition and a crew, but alone, in a small inflatable Zodiac raft. Both, again citing Bradford, reached approximately the same location on the map, around seventy degrees north, in Melville Bay. More importantly, as in Bradford’s expedition, Becker’s intentions are always both artistic and scientific.

His documentary work has a profound lyric poetry. Revealing the dramatic beauty of the overwhelming blanket of ice; at the same time showing its transience, because here, in the uninhabited region of Greenland, human influence and climate change have fatal consequences: dust and soot, in the form of black air combined with global warming, accelerating the melting of the plates with catastrophic results; no longer avoidable.

The details that emerge from each job, are a masterful set for the process of formation of: holes, channels, stratification levels, even great underground lakes; revealing the inescapable intensity of the sublime.

A technical view of the author – Becker’s photography  is of great size and has a necessarily slow construction process that begins by determining what needs to be photographed, followed by: the use of a tripod, the camera and the necessary time to adjust the focus. The preparation is meticulous and methodical. The procedure is almost a ritual that is repeated many times. The images produced which have as their subject the photograph of the landscape often tend to have a formal impact and at the same time profoundly contemplative, as in the case of Becker.

(1) M. Warnke, political landscape. For a history of the social transformations of nature, published in Italy by the Catholic University, 1996.

Bio:

Olaf Otto Becker ( born in Lübeck-Travemünde, Germany in 1959). Initially influenced by Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Russian photography; for then among others approaching photographers as Americans: Meyerowitz, Misrach, Paul Graham, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams. He’s a refined traveler whose skill lies in narrating the most distant and wild corners of the globe.
Among the many international exhibitions in which he participated, we include: El Paso Museum of Art, Texas; Tufts University Art Gallery, Boston; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada; The Alt + 1000 Festival de Photographie de mountains, Rossiniere, Switzerland; at The 2nd International Festival for Photography, Iang Gallery, Seoul; at the International Photo Festival Ulsan, South Korea; The National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; in 2008 at a Solo Project, with the Gallery f 5,6 to ART Basel.

Camilla Boemio is a curator, a critic of contemporary art, and a consultant of university research projects whose analysis practice treats the participation policies of guardianship and the art-science current. Boemio has co-founded and directs the AAC platform and is a associate curator of APT - Artist Pension Trust.
Her writings and interviews have appeared in various publications, sector magazines and catalogs.
She has helped to realize 'Portable Nation' published by Maretti editor and supported by the Berkeley Center for New Media; She’s currently working on a new publication about photography with the University of Derby, England; and on a chapter of 'Territories of Trauma and Decay' essay, with Punctum Books.

Opening: June 11, 2015 from 19:00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Gianpaolo Arena

At the Gallery "ANTEPRIMA d'Arte Contemporanea" will be presented a photographic selection of the project "Teatro d'Italia" by the author Massimo Siragusa.  Sicilian photographer, who lives in Rome, but stateless because of his cultural formation, with an enormous intellectual spirit and curiosity, he exposed in various art galleries and international institutions and he won several major awards including four World Press Photo.

The works presented in this exibition expose pictures of antique and contemporary places, more or less known, like monuments, historical centers, churches, temples, villas, gardens, terraces and squares. So we get slowly introduced through the houses, the squares, the streets, the walls, courtyards, palaces, the arcades, the persons, the lights and the voices. We assist as observers to the unveiling of the public dimensions and the representative one , and in part of the private and the domestic one. With our sight we cross the spaces of the ritual, of the social relations, of the performance, of the culture.The city is the theatre of history and of his memory, the maximum creation and manifestation of the human civilation, the repertory of forms and shapes, and his scenery in literature, in politics, in his morality and of his thoughs. The reading of his traces, their accumulation and the settling of the contemporary city into the historical one make every formation of the city unique and strongly indentitary. Every comunity is it’s alive testimony of it’s own history, of it’s people and civilitation. Every one of them covers itself of his essential and unrepeatable features. Some signs of this various archeological experience show what every city was originally. In the eternity of those images we find again the greek polis and the ancient Etruscan cities, Rome and his own territory, the medieval town, the Renaissance, and the post-industrial society. The urban space and the social space determine the lines of force and the balance between the various parts, which redefines the soul of the city. The urban morphology was born and reborn thousands of times, deeply renewing itself and making it once again a very important past. The order of nature and the order of the culture live together harmoniously among the same streets where Virgilio, Dante, Ariosto were imprinting their steps. The red string wich unifies the Alps to Sicily is the beauty of the cities and the landscapes, the immmaterial values through which they revive the places of the soul and memory, the spaces of the communities, of the consciousness and the national identity. Beyond the holistic references and beyond the classic iconography, the viewer encounters a visual archive of plots, hypothesis and paths through which relationships are established and gives the right value of what we hold most precious. An ideal and metaphoric travel, a cultural itinerary with the geographic emotions of the Belpaese through visions, dreams and miths.

The images of Massimo Siragusa, born from the curiosity of discovery and from the desire for knowledge, are evocative, elegant, sophisticated and able to tell the space which is around us and the beauty of our extraordinary artistic heritage. And with them the story, the identity, the culture, the economy, life of Italy.

Opening: February 25, 2015 from 19.00
Gallery: Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio

The exhibition aims to introduce the viewer in the various series made in the last ten years by photographers Andreana Scanderbeg Sauer & Alexander, skilled narrators of control technologies. In their achievements there is confidence in technological innovation, the beauty of contemporary architecture; showing a better expression of urban life changing. Each snapshot shows that immortalizing architecture isn’t less complex than capturing the right expression of a face in a portrait.

The exhibition narrates  people and urban worlds through the built landscape, considering photography as an ambitious and perhaps more suited tool to document it, rather than the symbiosis between the two disciplines, 'Iconic Geography' describes  how a photographical path can help orient the eye: from envisaged life around impassable sites, to the analysis of industrial impact on the territory and how to develop the work in industrial contexts. The photographers have explored many different geographical places on the edge of civilization where mankind often capitulates and surrenders. In these aesthetically perfect images they have evoked the glorious past of iconic aircrafts that are abandoned in the desert, whose carcasses tells us about journeys, enhancing the lines and shapes.

In the new series, 'Chavalon', they have captured the morbid beauty of progress and identified an appearance of loss of control.Goods, trains, ships, production processes and industrial landscapes fill the outskirts of the world; describing to us about  progress and movements, journeys and worlds made of work in which people in the companies apply technologies and innovation.

A world, not at all known, appears in our eyes as if timing and determination tell us about progresses and defeats; where we are going, and where probably we will arrive with our discoveries and in the economy evolution.

If until a few decades ago, photographs that told us about the world of work were a prerogative of  company archives - today they have become the research and have a new form of collectivism.

In the evaluated choices for their first  Italian exhibition, it was thought of as a story in which were retraced the routes of the frenetic world of business and goods, and how the stages of the metropolis are interspersed with suburban places where the story delves into the internal of: silos, pipes, special industrial machineries and companies in which the noise and the glimmer of gas, the fire and the steam dialogue with the routine.

As in an actual remake of 'Red Noise' by Michelangelo Antonioni we are distracted from that articulated and industrial landscape in which you lose, or find yourself.

Finissage: February 18, 2015 from 19.00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
By Giuseppe Ussani d’Escobar

Let’s shut our eyes for a moment and imagine Pulcinella (Punch), that bizarre character who has gladdened our Sundays when we were kids, and our grandfathers  used to take us to the Gianicolo to see him in the flesh at the Puppet Theatre, he would guide us in a fantastic journey through the south of Italy, that part which is often treated badly but at the same time loved and has spread her warmth, her humanity to the rest of the world, enriching our view and rendering it more profound, ironic and easygoing.
Here we are in Naples, once capital of the Borbone’s Reign, right at the bottom of the erupting Vesuvius which is launching lapillus in the air with innocuous fireworks, with Mount Somma right at his side; the panorama in front of our eyes reminds us of the Neapolitan gouaches with fire sunsets that flares up the sea and the sky. We’ll stop by Capodimonte, with its majestic gardens and step inside the Museum which houses the prestigious Farnese’s collection finding ourselves in front of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s masterpiece: “The Parable of the Blind” revisited by the meticulous attention and craftiness of our Giancarlino: A blind man on a road guided by another blind man surely won’t have a good end; and Capodimonte’s fine porcelain china coloured at the rhythm of the blind moving in a cheerful march, underlining the fragility of human’s life in the presence of eternity…
The ship is leaving the port of Naples, we have to hurry, we set sail towards Capri, the beloved island of Emperor Tiberius and of Axel Munthe where he always wanted to build his dwelling Villa San Michele, in love with the magical glimpses which this splendid island can offer us, we’ll visit the villa and through the eyes of the sphinx we’ll explore the horizon. At Anacapri in the Church of San Michele Arcangelo, we’ll linger hypnotized from the splendour and beauty of the pavement:   the tiles reveal countless minute details, a universe unfolds before us, we remain attracted and involved; we will mount the unicorn and ride through our memory of Chivalric Romances, far with Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Now we head towards the deep South together with Pulcinella, reaching Calabria’s coasts arriving there just in the moment when two giants rise from the sea and move towards us, they’re entirely covered by shells and seaweeds, two ancient knights; they’re believed to come from Athenes after a shipwreck, also there are rumors that a famous sculptor, a certain Phidias, has blown them a breath of life, making their veins, their nerves, their muscles ready to spring for a fight and a sport competition. The sea guarded them and returned them to our curiosity; that open sea who also donated to us the Satyr of Mazara del Vallo, the same sea on which waves fishermen chase a swordfish, the same swordfish of Modugno’s  song, that swordfish prepared with the salmoriglio, enchants the most refined and demanded palates.  
We cross the sea once more and reach the shores of Sicily, the Greek Phoenician, Roman, Arab, Swabian, Norman, Angevin and Aragonese Triskelion ( Trinacria); an island where in the middle of the Mediterranean has received the cosmopolitanism of civilization. We visit the Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina and contemplate the extraordinary nature mosaics, a magical microcosm will capture our imagination: people, plants and animals with their harmonic motions in these tiles, create surreal and dreamlike spaces, giving us a wonderful Time travel . And it’s the turn of Caltagirone, with its rich chromatic pottery and his anthropomorphic figures oil-lamps, inspires Giancarlino’s creativity.A fast and funny tribute to Camilleri's Montalbano and a dutiful tribute to Gibellina in the heart of Sicily, where Senator Corrao, the day after the earthquake has dedicated to the revival of art and hope in the future the land that opened to swallow the dreams of men: Because we people of the South, are like this, we raise again, we are like Pulcinella: we manage to invent and improvise life, beating the devil and mocking death; difficulties challenge our imagination. We from the South go crazy for the pizza margherita, pastiera, cannoli, aubergine Parmigiana and never forget to order a Pending Coffee ( caffè sospeso) going into a bar ...... one we drink ... ..and the other one we leave to the stranger who may also need it, in a gesture of solidarity ... since coffee in Naples is a caress, a cuddle to which you abbandon your self with great pleasure, they serve it in a hot small cup alongside a glass of cold fresh water, and a caress can’t be denied to anyone ...

Opening: May 22, 2014 from 19:00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio

In 1968, in the middle of the Vietnam War an apocalyptic scenario was portrayed to the world, masterfully depicted in 'Apocalypse Now' by Francis Ford Coppola, in 'Platoon' and 'Born on the Fourth of July' by Oliver Stone and in 'Full Metal Jacket' by Stanley Kubrick - the vivid scenes of violence reveals a symbolic clash of defeat, a scream of a generation against war, countless political divisions of a West that bends and an East Asia that enters in the collective memory.
Vietnam becomes an icon. Remembering and talking about it turns on a deep wound. If democracy in the United States is being challenged, as never before
now, Vietnam becomes the impenetrable undisputed example of a certain imagination.
The appeal and fear of the unknown has been passed on to us, developing 
an aesthetic and a deep sense of mystery.
Made of long silences interrupted by the noise of scooters and by the feverish 
circulation, returning in extensive landscapes in which you get lost in rice fields or frenetic city streets, between faces of people, until you reach a boat that slowly goes up the river - explaining a country, perhaps allowing you to discover another one ,  is a masterful tale  realized  ​​from Arena of today’s Vietnam.
His journey is the journey of a Westerner who finds himself, describing what he sees by strongly revealing his intimacy during an inner journey in which documentations and visions of a landscape, of  it’s people and their customs converge – sometimes sublimely-.
In his Vietnam, there is a personal imagery in which at times the fog, and 
scenarios, of East Asia converge with Veneto,( the Italian Region). I cannot stop my self  lingering on the image of a woman staring at the horizon, through the branches of a tree, we do not see her face, but only her beautiful raven-black moving hair , telling us about: pauses, unknown spaces and unexplored stories.
All the faces of the protagonists, in Arena’s photos, are distant presences, they are secondary actors of a romantic continent. 
On the contrary the landscapes recall the documentation of: cultural, 
political, personal implications and the radical transformations of the Vietnamese community. The result is a reading experience that gives the feeling of digging beneath the surface of these images, revealing not only the nature landscape photography but the essence of a territory.
The photograph has been seen in two radically different lenses: either as 
alert and precise act of knowledge, of intelligence awareness, or as a way of intuitive meeting, pre - intellectual. The second case is the one in which Arena gets
close to Vietnam, the intuition leads him to show us a heroic effort of attention, with an ascetic discipline, and a mystical receptivity of the world by imposing the photographer to switch to a cloud of unawareness.
The landscapes tells us about a Vietnam, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes colorful and mysterious. The great urban and landscapes emptiness  are interspersed with the density and the chaos of big cities. We are projected on a journey in which the immortalized subjects feed aesthetic awareness and encourage emotional detachment; revealing a lack of time.

Opening: February 20, 2014 from 19:00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio

The exhibition is a journey through pictures,  evasion and memory, at the boundary between the sublime and the daily routine. Made from an organic bodywork. The unreleased photographs by Swiss: Ursula Sprecher & Andi Cortellini, the series by Juliane Eirich and video by Johanna Eliisa Laitanen. This last Aura of Place d 'Armes is the story of an attempt to preserve a past which perhaps never existed. Laitanen describes memories put together from fragments, a repetitive story in the same context in which it took place. Surely emerges the architecture originality, the place’s rituals and the methodical reconstructions. It focuses on the examination of strong moments as well as intermediate states: in the early morning, the emptiness of the place, the exercises. By combining persistence with sudden references and a story, that takes place in different temporal levels, generating an unreal atmosphere work. The work was shot in 2009 inside Louis XIV’s stables in Versailles, the entrusted part of the “Académie du Spectacle Equestre”, an institution that promotes and preserves the equestrian art. The immaculate vision of the place and its regulating norms serve as a protest against the values ​​still in force. The Academy is enclosed in its own little world similar to that in a glass bottle, an idealistic attempt to create and preserve something profoundly beautiful but artificial. In this work, illusion is shattered by the threat, always lurking for imperfection.  Itoshima by Eirich explores the conflicting emotions during the residency in a beautiful old house in the countryside of south subtropical Japan.
By bike, she has explored, the region of Itoshima collecting new impressions: by day and by night, in the countryside and in the cities, in the stifling heat during heavy rain and storm.
She narrates the discovery of a place between dreams and introspection. Her images have an iconographic quality with no time or history. What is trivial, changes, because of the wise use of light, color, and because it is funneled  into a new perspective in which places created by mankind interact with the surrounding nature. This, rearranging the lines and bringing the viewer into an emotional contemplation of the place depicted.
In the series HobbyBuddies Sprecher & Cortellini group portraits become improbable sets in which people are united by the same passions, jobs or interests. Nothing is left to chance. The images betray the research and the careful organization: the number of subjects and their clothing, props, accessories. The approach used conveys in unusual, intriguing compositions.
All attributable to a membership tribe in which the loss of individuality favors harmony and unification with other equals in the slightest detail. We are all in our most widespread  realism attributed to a sample, in which the everyday emerges, presenting a version that can be sometimes surprising and amusing.

Opening: November 7, 2013 from 19:00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio

Marco Zanta's solo show “Geographies” is presented as a versatile body where the whole city becomes what  Cedric Price defined as “brain - city” (1). The changes which affect the city determine also the observer's point of view. Architecture consideres all elements and reflects how time goes by. Marco Zanta's " Geographies" picture a large vision in which observers find themselves spontaneously submerged in an ideal model where lines, houses and streets become one.
The three pictures that belong to the serie Urban Europe ( 2008) do include important unpublished work of the artist. His latest exemplars show the image of the Maxxi museum melting toghether with the view of cities like Bilbao and Manchester. All comes toghether, the chromatic contrasts of steel, the London architecture and the linearity of Ponzano. Quoting Price again:" Architecture is a liberating action responsible for the improvement  of life quality as it encourages normal people to go beyond their limits and habits and to image the unthinkable. Architecture stimulates changes,intelectual growth and social development (2). For Zanta, photography has always been a way of making the world his own. He has always considered photography as a gift in order to know and to preserve, but also a way of keeping gestures, looks...also a good method of appropiating everything which is around (3).
Zanta, as many of the photographers of his generation (Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, Gabriele Basilico) interprets the urban space asking himself about how to represent  the landscape and especially about how to relate and deal with photographic language  and architectural design.

(1) Curating with Light lugguage, curated by Maria Lind and Liam Gillick, Frankfurt am Maim and Munchen: 2005.
(2) Cedric Price, architect of impermanence, article by Klat published on November 29 2012
(3) Taken from an interview conducted by MLGagliardi 'The Measure of Space' published by Contrast in 2010 and presented to the Festival of Architecture in Rome 2010.

Opening: 7th May from 07.00 PM
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio

David Stewart’s photographic world has its roots in the seventies punk aesthetic imagination of his friends The Clash and The Ramones, the bright colors, the rarefied and intense, the strong sense of the ridiculous and excess, an aesthetic and an enchantress  originality that makes us trace the history of a musical film, similar to “The Boat That Rocked”, in which we ourselves become funny and eccentric main characters. His visions and its scenic compositions has earned him the final for the best portrait’s competition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In contrast to other authors more neutral, his characters reveal their English identity, both in the choice of the interior of homes and environments in general, both for the nature of the characters, and the way they dress and pose. Stewart’s first exhibition in Rome, at the Anteprima Contemporary Art gallery  there will be exhibited nine works of the new series, with unpublished options. In - decision he analyzes the tension that follows indecision, starring girls all inside rooms: from the academic classroom, to the kitchen equipped with a small oven in all shades of green, from the walls to the girl's dress. The surreal portraits of women alongside daring combinations of places / tasks, in which they are immersed in deep thoughts: distant, catapulted into the wrong room or in the more unusual background for them. From the series Thrice Removed there will be exhibited Hugh and chicken in profile in which there is a conspicuous profile of an old man and a hen, a retelling of Grease Party "Saturday Night Fever" in a familiar way, followed by three works (Chair Ballet, Dancers and Reclining woman) in which the geometry of the postures and designers create perfect symmetry, a sexy courtesan and an indescribable soldier in camouflage.

David Stewart has exhibited in Italy: a European Photography in Reggio Emilia (2013 edition), at the Institutional exhibition CABBAGE in Macerata (2010) and Modena (2011) with the curatorship of Camilla Boemio.

They wrote of his works and published numerous series of newspaper headlines and international magazines of Art/ photography,  of which:

The column of Marina Mojana of Sunday’s Sole 24 Ore (2011), NOVA. Il Giornale dell’Arte, The Guardian, , L’ Espresso , Panorama, the column ELLE Decor , Gente di Fotografia 50# , BLINK e LANDSCAPE Stories .

Opening: February 21, 2013, from 19.00

Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome

By Giuseppe Ussani d’Escobar

February 21, 2013 inaugurates the first solo show of Alberto Parres at Anteprima Contemporary Art Gallery, on the third floor of an elegant building overlooking Piazza Mazzini, a location suspended between sky  and earth, of great suggestiveness.  The show will remain open until 21 April. The artist, well known by critics and the public, on this occasion exhibits his latest paintings in small and large dimension. As the curator Joseph Ussani d'Escobar says,  "Theseworks are the essence of light.  They are a breeze after the rain that rise up and interact with space and light."   He alsowrites, "To understand the light we are forced to cross the darkness. The rationality is feed forirrationality and can not live without it.  The Byzantine art of Ravenna created the mystique of metaphysics.  The figures were outlined by the artists on the gold of the sky.  The shadows of Parres, friends of the artist or the spirits that arise from the color, magically absorbed by color, are nothing but a big question facing the immensity of the universe. This ecstatic wonder consists of veils that defy the rules of gravity and are the essence of what is left of us, the dust of our bodies, our dreams and desires.  Gold has the force that purifies all, the last item which sought the alchemical scale, the purification of the shadows through the gold.  The Sound of the King has gold in the mouth, as the first light of dawn reveals the face of the sun.   A show full of life and energy which opens the horizons of the mind, trespassing the Roman sky,the sky of the Eternal City. "

Opening: October 18, 2012, from 19.00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
By Camilla Boemio

The very first exhibit of Dutch photographer Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk, in an Italian art gallery, is setup with an ample choice of works, from several series, taken in the last years. A multifaceted panorama in which the visitors will be able to immerse themselves in the scientific world, rarely presented in a refined and efficient way. The research of the reproduction and the creation of nature have a fundamental role relative to nature itself. Mr. Schattenkerk refers his photographic work to the epitome of nature. He creates an imaginary space age in a fragmented, parallel world both inside and outside the cosmography of Crichton, which takes form in the revelation of aliens and the most abstract details. His source of inspiration and starting point is his vivid imagination and a deep knowledge of genre literature; this is the case of Andromeda Strain, which is named after the 1971 science fiction movie directed by Robert Wise based on a 1969 novel by Michael Crichton. In this book, a team of scientists investigates a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism. Mr. Schattenkerk tests the limits of natural photography and joining it with the artificial one – reproduction, combining in his photo series of life shots with exemplary creations carried out in his studio. He shows the complex biological and geological processes with unusual elements and materials. The union resulting from the fictitious process of this hybrid backdrop makes it hard to distinguish the different elements: the natural panorama seems artificial at times and the in-studio creation looks like a shot secretly taken in a lab or during an expedition. His use of light is masterly - as seen in his panaromas of salt crystals that look like gigantic creatures forged by nature and bad weather; seaweeds and marine plant life rendered in their habitat; the micro forest on fire. Mr. Schattenkerk is able to find exotic places in his daily spaces, some works, especially the rocky landscapes, reproduce views of Amsterdam that look like Persia, Afghanistan or the setting of a Western film! 

Camilla Boemio

Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk, was born in 1974 in Holland, graduated from the School of Photography in the famous Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Since he graduated in 2007, lives and works in Amsterdam, and exhibits in various projects in the Netherlands and abroad. In 2008 he was awarded the prize of photography dell'Hyères Festival in France. He has exhibited in the Netherlands, all'Amesterdam Centre for Photography, the Museum Waterland, the Seelevel Gallery. Last year he participated in the group show dell'ISWA European project at the Museum Botanical Garden of Rome, now has his first solo exhibition in a gallery in Italy.

March 2nd 2012, at 7.00 p.m.

till May 15th  2012

Curated by Lýdia Pribišová

On Friday, March 2nd, at 7 p.m., the new gallery ANTEPRIMA Galleria d’arte contemporanea opens its doors with the first solo show in Italy of  young artist Ján Vasilko. The exhibition consists of two series of paintings: one representing new works and another one portraying older production.

The painting of Ján Vasilko is very closely connected with the avantgarde movements between two world wars, especially Constructivism, Suprematism and Dadaism. The young artist uses two aspects of avangarde that he considers the most important such as idealism and romanticism. His works oscillate between abstraction and landscape painting, between ideal architecture and rigorous construction. Pure manuscript, geometric precision and clear composition predominate all his acrylic painting but moderate colors and monochromatic superficies are characteristic to his earlier works. Vasilko’s new paintings are enriched by playful elements and their chromatic spectrum is expanded, however they still are based on linear relationships from the previous works.

The inspiration for his ideas comes from the enthusiasm for mechanical productions, various agrarian mechanisms, factories and robots. In fact, the machines in the pictures of Vasilko obtain the function of heroes and become the voices of philosophical and ideological messages. Some pieces in big format represent atypical citadels, the monuments of our days. These ascetic architectures are on the one hand successors of the utopias of the past, with the reference to Tatlin’s tower and cloud-irons of El Lisickij, on the other hand they represent new social constructs, the projection of personal utopic dreams of a better society. Vasilko is able to extract from the static residues the dynamic and lively scenes, full of illusions, anxiety, melancholy that do not miss the absurdity and icy humor. The painter admires and yet, at the same time jokes from the politically engaged art. Together with his colleague Peter Králik he is a co-founder of the apolitical party, The Steel Party, whose goal is to reflect on social and political problems.

Ján Vasilko was born in 1979 in Humenné, in Slovak Republic, he lives and works in Košice. He was presented in various public and private galleries, as Wannieck Gallery, Brno (2010); Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava (2010); Strabag Haus, Wien (2009); Praguebiennale 4, Karlin Halls, Prague (2009); Freies Museum, Berlin (2009). In 2005 he was the resident at ISCP Studios in New York.