ART CITIES: Rome-Di Tutti I Colori

The group exhibition “Di tutti I Colori” celebrates the theme of color, in homage to the text written by Alberto Boatto in 2008, “Di tutti i colori. Da Matisse a Boetti, le scelte cromatiche dell’arte moderna”. The book, from the title of which the exhibition takes inspiration, shows samples of the colors of modern and contemporary art, reinterpreting the work of the masters of the avant-garde starting from their unusual color preferences, and revealing the connection of technique with poetry.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galleria Continua Archive

The exhibition “Di Tutti I Colori” presents contemporary art’s chromatic choices via the monochrome logos attributed to Galleria Continua’s locations while moving examining the polychromatic propensities of all the artists and colors of the world. The exhibition intends to explore the artists’ research through a comparison with different cultural-historical moments and situations, covering a wide geographical range. Color is an obvious but at the same time elusive aspect of reality: an interesting element to help analyze how the linguistic terms associated with color differ across many cultures and societies. On display are the works of nine artists who are confronted with pictorial concepts such as materiality, corporeality and surface. The unusual nature of these different positions  consists in the interest in the physical processes of the painting itself, in the  almost procedural work on the surface  of the painting or object. The artists chosen focus on color and pigment seen as elements of material and content,  which complete the pictorial surface, sometimes expanding it to a three-dimensional plane. The materiality of color can be more or less tangible in the works presented here, and in some, the media and the material properties  of the pigment become real tactile events. The exhibition opens with an emblematic embroidery by Alighiero Boetti; the artist, playing with languages, varies the color of the Latin letters from one box to another, while Eastern writing changes gradation when passing from one horizontal strip to the next. From the 1989 tapestry by the Italian master, we move on to a new series of embroidered works by the contemporary Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou who has always been interested in materials and their meanings. The industrial colors of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s famous mirrors – an artist interpreter of a constantly evolving research open to dialogue and exchange and Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, a sort of large and perfectly smooth drop that’s blood red, a color that the artist defines as contradictory and violent but at the same time fragile and delicate, counterbalance the delicate and artisanal works mentioned previously. The first room ends with a series of watercolors, “Stories in Color”, by Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov, who here uses color as a means to give depth to the delicate and poetic images of the characters that populate his creative universe. In the second room, the artists Daniel Buren and Moataz Nasr use color to play with shapes. On the one hand, Daniel Buren with “A Frame in a Frame in a Frame, N ° 39 Red – Aka” bright red and white stripes on framed glass plates that make up a fragmented geometric shape; on the other, Moataz Nasr with “Come to Light”, a series of transparent crystals in the colors of the rainbow that take shape from the superimposition of three geometric shapes: the cube that recalls the human body, the octagon as an emblem of the soul and the semicircle as an image of the infinite. Cuban artist José Yaque transports us into the material and vibrant vastness of the color that he spreads with his hands on the canvas. In the folds of the surface stirred by complex overlaps of color, everything  becomes a dance. Zhanna Kadyrova with “Diamond” chooses a midnight blue color to transform ceramic tiles from a poor, everyday material into a precious object. The artistic practice of Marinella Senatore, characterized by  a strong collective and participatory dimension and a narrative centered on social, political and cultural themes, is expressed in this exhibition through a series of colorful photographic collages. The exhibition ends with a monochrome painting by Loris Cecchini  where the gaze is lost in a luminous  surface of velvet dust.

Works by: Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Loris Cecchini, Zhanna Kadyrova, Anish Kapoor, Jannis Kounellis, Moataz Nasr, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Marinella Senatore, Nedko Solakov, Pascale Marthine Tayou, José Yaque.

Photo: Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2007, resin and paint, 71 x 50 x 48 cm  / 28 x 19,7 x 18,9 in, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo by: Sara De Santis

Info: Galleria Continua, The St. Regis Rome, Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando 3, Rome, Italy, Duration: 17/12/2021-12/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00 by appointment only (book here), www.galleriacontinua.com