TIBER

FRAME INVITES #5

Dommelhof Pelt, Belgium, 2022

Last year a friend borrowed me a book about the Deutsche-Romher, artists that came to Rome in the 1800s. Opening it, I found a group of photocopies taken from a BVRLINGTON magazine of 1991. The text tells about the relationship between young artist meeting themselves at Café Greco. It presents thirty 10 cm. portraits made by Samuel Amsler: refined faces on which the light of intelligence shines, high foreheads, and jackets that minimize the shoulders’ width. Only one of them, Carl Fohr, beautiful, looks down sadly. Reading the text, I discovered that on 29 June 1818, they all went to the Tiber, but he drowned; his portrait is posthumous, done to give him a dignified tomb.

I immediately empathised with these forgotten artists, taking them thirty similar size polaroids; the snapshots bring them here and now, immersing them in a rosy light. I also began two long-format drawings, an investigative story about the mermaid hidden in the whirlpool who caused his end,  well known to Bocklin. Near the drawings celebrating the forgotten young artists, I put the crazed cartography of the numerous travels of the restless brothers in the pulsional portrait of Europe and other archival papers.