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25/8/2011

Alessandro Roma

Galerie Alexandra Saheb, Berlin

Among Gilles Deleuze’s theories, a concept more than others has marked my researches, that of the “fold” and the “interstice” which I used as a tool to explore contemporary abstraction. In short, Deleuze departs from the Baroque to demonstrate that our spatial and temporal coordinates are relative. The Baroque, indeed, prefiguring the hereafter, reveals us that our position is well grounded and rooted on earth and that we must search for the "divine" within us. Baroque painting, but especially sculpture, repositions our body into a new mathematical system not measurable accor- ding to the coordinates of Leon Battista Alberti's perspective, which instead were the basis of Renaissance culture.

The weather effects of the ceilings painted by Gaulli, for example, or the folds and twists sculpted by Bernini, make the space deep, a collection of atmospheric forces: rays, explosions, flashes and waves whose origin remains almost unknown. These forces are brought to life in the works of Alessandro Roma, layers of "masses" and not well identified signs that once we would have imputed to supernatural forces, such as those that the medium leaves on paper during a séance or the automatic calligrams escaped from the surrealists’ subconscious. Here, however, there is something different. The signs left by Alessandro do not come from imagination or dream. Rather they come from a careful observation of the infosphere in which we are immersed. His landscapes, for example, have neither horizon nor vanishing points. On the contrary, they are rich of folds, like those mentioned by Deleuze, and interstices in which space seems to close. What the eye sees, then, is a system of possibilities: holes, shadow cones, stains and textures of an electronic nature.

Space, reduced as it is to such an immaterial stage, therefore, becomes even more real because it is not only to the eye that is delegated its exploration. The viewer's brain is called in and asked to unfold the folds and fill them with his own presence. If this invitation is not clear in front of the paintings and reliefs on the wall, already quite extended in space, surely we would not escape in presence of the sculptures. Observing these ever-changing masses, surrounding them with our movements and suddenly changing the direction of our steps, we are called to reconsider our own position on earth. The chances that Alessandro’s works offer, are endless, and have nothing to do with the formlessness of matter, as we might think initially, but with the inform-act-ion and with the way we see reality. The interstice, therefore, is not a space between things but, if anything, an organism where we recognize things between spaces. Once involved in this eschato- logical device, we realize that it is not the matter used by the artist which loses shape but our conventions and convic- tions, what we thought was a landscape and what we thought we were ourselves.
Francesco Spampinato

Image: Veramente il luogo ha qualche cosa di originario, 2010, collage graffite spray su carta, 192 x 100 cm

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Galerie Alexandra Saheb
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