The exhibition titled “A due passi dal caos. Opere di Emanuela Fiorelli e Paolo Radi” (“Just a stone’s throw from chaos – works by Emanuela Fiorelli and Paolo Radi”) is to be inaugurated on Monday, 21 October 2024 at 5:30 PM, as part of the ninth Edition of ROME ART WEEK. This will be the first event in the new spaces of Studio Briguglio, designed and configured to host exhibitions and meetings focusing on the culture of design and the relationship between art and architecture.
A due passi dal caos refers to the Studio’s calm, out-of-the-way aspect, located in the former industrial area of Nuovo Trastevere and its considerable, continuous urban flows. But it is also and above all a metaphor for a condition, as involuntary as it is inescapable, of proximity to indeterminacy and randomness, to imponderable interferences in communication, to accidentally overlapping meanings and the bugs inherent in an overburdened and dysfunctional daily life that is lived – and is to be lived – as a hallucination. It is a hybrid daily life, debated and tossed between the harshness of the physical world and the seductive, stupefying ambiguities of the social media, where the principle of truth often vacillates and collapses into falsehood.
Everything is possible. Everything is accessible. Everything is elsewhere.
We feel the need for a here and now, for a space of quiet, purified by the filter of distance, where relations and communications are direct, mutual, and without interference.
This is the need that gave rise to the exhibition project, in which the works by Fiorelli and Radi, with their physicality, become bearers of a principle of authenticity that is anything but assertive and deceptive because it is founded upon direct observation. It is a principle that moves emotions and critical thinking. It welcomes and at the same time challenges the perception of grappling with physical space and with the space of representation, which interact with one another until fusing into the enveloping dimension of individual experience.
Emanuela Fiorelli’s works dialogue with – and seek to forge relationships with – architectural space; her weavings strain this space and change our perception of it. Progressive, rhythmic variations create a geometric – and poetic – rewriting of the context that leads the observer to movement, in fact generating movement. Within and through the objective space, the state of tension of the fine cords that make up the work outlines the vibrating skeleton of aerial volumes permeable to the gaze.
To the contrary, Paolo Radi’s space is a collected one, taking substance in the perceptive focus of opalescent treasure chests that contain and condense time and light within themselves. From the cold surface of the painting, purified of any possible and unessential semantic interference, iconic, geometrically patterned bodies rise. While perfectly perceptible, they are uncertain in their contours, brought to the immaterial dimension of a latent transformation by the blurring of the matter that holds them.
A due passi dal caos: the works by Fiorelli and Radi are resilient forms of the contemporary that claim the frontality of the viewer, leading to a fuller and more enveloping practicability of art.
