Alessandro Roma | Dressing Landscape

The Museo Civico Medievale, in collaboration with the CAR Gallery contemporary art gallery in Bologna, presents Vestirsi paesaggio, a solo exhibition by Alessandro Roma.

Having lived in Milan, London, and Brussels, Alessandro Roma has chosen Faenza as his home in recent years. An “existential weariness”—as he confesses in an interview with Lorenzo Balbi—led him to prefer Italian provincial life over large cities, which are mistakenly considered the privileged spaces for advanced knowledge and development. He is drawn to the freedom of space offered by the "periphery," in contrast to the dominant forms of culture that emerge in major cities, especially when the possibilities available allow for a dialogue with a centuries-old tradition of technical expertise acquired through the steady practice of artistic craftsmanship.

Indeed, the art of ceramics suits him very well, as evidenced by the works exhibited in the show, called Mask: sculptures placed on iron pedestals, shaped like vases or planters, but transformed by a regenerative and instinctive metamorphic energy—or an unexpected, disorienting spell—into masks.

Also on display are two painted fabric dresses, combined with glazed ceramics—Dressing Landscape, as the artist has named them—which evoke the forms of nature and are conceived "as presences that can inhabit the museum" (Alessandro Roma).

The solo exhibition thus directs Alessandro Roma's research towards a dialogue with the museum’s collection objects, while still following experimental lines typical of his usual artistic practice.

The exhibition title, Vestirsi paesaggio (Dressing Landscape), effectively encapsulates the primary focus behind the exhibition: to reflect on the interaction with the surrounding world, understood both as a vital and subjective environment in which the individual finds their own way of being—habitat ambiguously alluding to abito (dress)—and as a "collective and universal" dimension of landscape (L. Balbi).