EN PLEIN AIR
Kerstin Brätsch – Enzo Cucchi – Stanislao Di Giugno – Marino Melarangelo – Rochelle Feinstein – Gianni Politi – Max Renkel – Patricia Treib – Paulina Semkowicz & Myles Starr
12.05.18 – 21.05.18
“Rogues, cheats, pickpockets / bands of drunks and gluttons / scabby tobacconists, barbers, and other ‘sordid’ subjects.” That is how Salvator Rosa defined the favorite subjects of the Bamboccianti, a group of artists active in the 17th century in the northern area of Rome, who depicted Arcadian landscapes alongside scenes from the everyday life of the city’s slums.
Studioli opens its space to host a group of artists invited to work on the theme of en plein air painting. The artists — Kerstin Brätsch, Enzo Cucchi, Stanislao di Giugno, Marino Melarangelo, Rochelle Feinstein, Gianni Politi, Max Renkel, Paulina Semkowicz & Myles Starr, and Patricia Treib — work directly within the spaces of Studioli.
The rooms/garçonnières, the terrace, the small wood, the landscape of Tor di Quinto, and the view over the Tiber River form the scenography of this happening. The exhibition highlights the creative process, the artist’s gestures, the working tools, and the conceptual and visual adaptation to the place where the work is produced.
The exhibition also includes a conversation between Giorgio Orbi and Alessandro Cicoria.π
Studioli, January 24th, 2018
Dear Giorgio,
During the exhibition Peonie I remember we had a conversation about Ponte Milvio as an outpost and shelter for artists of the time, the Bamboccianti. Like street reporters, these painters of the ‘600 portrayed life on the margins of society: guitti, beggars, barbers, raids and fistfights, parties and scenes of everyday life, Arcadian landscapes.
Today artists are still fascinated by these portraits. Pedestrians, lawyers from the city, street sweepers and beggars are perhaps seduced as well. These new Bambocci capture, through photography, everyday life scenes: bus quarrels, thefts, street workers, gypsies camping under bridges. Nowadays, subjects once portrayed by the Bamboccianti are often self-portrayed.
There is a lot of adventure in such a visual revolution. I always run out of storage space on my phone and the memory is never enough.
Reflecting on this we invited, at Studioli, a group of painters free to imagine the history of our garçonnière, Ponte Milvio’s life, the night raids in Chatenet cars, Dulcamara starlets, the rural landscape that can still be glimpsed from the Tiber. Do you think somebody will paint the Mont Blanc of Mondi instead of appreciating its culinary art?
With En Plein Air painters we’ll see if painting, always considered a meditative practice — in contrast with the fast society we live in — can still tell us something.
I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Alessandro
Pordoi Pass, June 8th, 2018
Dear Alessandro,
Regarding what you said about memory not being enough, recently during a conference some artists complained that the historicisation process of their work within the art world, despite the efforts of the publishing industry and its employees, is slow and ineffective. Someone in the audience intervened by suggesting that they should better investigate the memory of their devices, or perhaps spend a weekend at Burning Man where works of art are exhibited and burned. Someone proposed giving Bergson's Matter and Memory a second read. Today we are all interested in immortality, not just artists. That’s why a multitude of images is recorded every day.
The boundaries of meditative practices expanded through techniques that go beyond horizons — until recently considered unknown.
We practice yoga to the rhythm of heavy metal or climb a mountain to break a speed record. The company that sells journeys out of the Earth's atmosphere has sent a DJ into space. In the terrestrial skies, the first rave party in the absence of gravity has been organised. In a nutshell, it seems that even in space we won’t be bored too much, we will just have to find another universe to preserve silence.
Did you know that when Hannibal crossed the Alps, along with the elephants he carried artworks? Unpublished works from the best artists of Carthage. Unfortunately they all went missing as it had happened with the books of the Royal Library of Alexandria.
The real attraction of en plein air painting is experimentation with reality. Painters left the studio to work outdoors, catching light, reflections, deception and enchantment of reality that could no longer be reproduced in the atelier.
In the last ten years the five historic palms of Piazza di Spagna have been reduced to three. There were also five in the first postcards of the square dating back to the ‘900. You could put rows of sandbags piled up under the palm trees to make a trench, along with a canvas, a stool and colours. A bivouac for artists who, while reproducing reality at close range, can also look beyond it. Let’s first historicise the palms of the 20th century.
EN PLEIN AIR is an experiment that doesn’t fear the judgment of the artificial resurrection of a practice which has been averted by time. Painting started indoors, inside caves. According to archaeologists, the oldest ones date back to 64,000 years ago. Animals, geometries, daily life scenes such as hunting, the human body, hands. Those were the subjects and with the passing of time things haven’t changed much.
It is true, as you say, the system goes fast, but it is normal, we are living in a time when we are having a lot of fun with robots. When painters manage to paint in the absence of gravity, reality will rise again unexpectedly, like those artists who, thanks to the vagaries of the market, have the opportunity to emerge in the limelight in their third age.
At that moment reality will be the talk of the town, as when rumor has it that the old owner of the restaurant in the neighborhood has not yielded to the mediocre charm of the square dish, despite it being now run by the son, the one who plucks his eyebrows.
Studying Bamboccianti you could find a certain trace, a strong connection with the attention that our contemporaneity prefers to establish with certain subjects. I am sure that this choice draws a timeline with the visual moods of the Bamboccianti and the original spirit that guides the Studioli exhibitions.
Today prostitutes are called escorts and “scooteroni” are the horses. Who will disturb the quiet of a hidden nutria among the reeds to make a portrait? Who will study the stickers on helmets or on scooters, the new hieroglyphs that tell the secret life of the young generation of Ponte Milvio? Van Laer's tobacconist is still there, but today he also sells marijuana with a low percentage of THC. But this is not the point.
Instead, gathering for an outdoor painting session in Rome today is very adventurous and enterprising. At least five large tall trees fell in 2017 alone. Whatever may be said, Rome is a city always on the move and no one seems to like being in the same place.
Not even the trees.
Giorgio