“TIBER” and the “IMAGE-THINKING CONCEPTUAL MAP”

Featured in three differents exhibitions:

FRAME INVITES #5, Dommelhof Pelt, Belgium, 2022 /

“CONTATTI INDICIBILI”, cur. by M.Chiara Wang, Museo Medievale Bologna, Italy, 2024/

BIENNALE DISEGNO RIMINI, cur, by M. Pulini and A. Lo Savio, Rimini, Italy, 2024/

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 Arnold 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. At first, in January 2022, I exhibited the polaroids and long drawings in Dommelhof Pelt, “Frame Invites 5#”. Yet, I felt that the work still needed to be finished.

In May 2023, a flood hit the region Emilia Romagna, where I live. My studio was submerged in 70cm. of muddy water. For two months, I did nothing but throw away drawings, photos, letters, books, chairs, and sofas; it was then that empathy became total, and I completed my artwork. Then, I drowned in my work as a Forh did in the Tiber. His drowning forced me to draw; it was a ritual, a gesture.

I created an installation with four faces:

1/ The first side of the two closest is dedicated to the self-portrait of old Europe and the mountains, the obstacle, and the challenge to complete himself as an artist that Forh was facing.

2/ In the second side, there are the photocopies of the BVRLINGTON MAGAZINE, the portraits of friends, passages of poems on old photocopies by the poet Milo de Angelis speaking about the nature of the artist. Lastly, the images on transparent sheets, of the divine geometry by which Carl is buried in front of the Cestia’s pyramid.

3/ On the third side are pieces of wood, plexiglass drowned in my studio, small sculptures in silicone rubber that personify the young drowned Carl, and my books by Sebald and Goethe that are now locked in there, near to rebirth drawings.

4/ On the fourth side, the mermaid and the Urpflanze, responsible of the death of Carl, are captured under a painting by Boeklin; the polaroids of the young people now have peacocks in the center, another symbol of rebirth. There are old polaroids fished out of the flood, and a dirty pink plexus which you can look through.

The artwork “Image-thinking conceptual map”, is an analogic display in which, using all the instruments of drawing, collage, photocopies, and photographs, I resumed all the contents of the archival artwork Tiber. It’s like a diagram, a storytelling, a conceptual box that uses the style of the archive office and is also an hommage to the Marcel Duchamp’s “Great Glass.”

Visible on both sides and in transparency, it presents different insights into the topic that nourished the whole projects, and can also be presented alone.