ARTE NUVOLA – CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR – FOCUSING ON PHOTOGRAPHY – ROMA

Arte Nuvola 18-21 /11 2021 – Rome (Italy) – www.romaarteinnuvola.eu

by Matilde Damele

This is the first year the art fair Arte in Nuvola opens up in Rome. It takes place from the 18th to the 21^st of November in the Nuvola Center’ big  space, presenting 120 Galleries of modern and contemporary art organized in three sections: Main Section, New Entries, Solo Show.
The art fair at la Nuvola, ‘the Cloud’, the steel and crystal free form space planned by the architect Massimiliano Fuksas, was designed and directed by Alessandro Nicosia, under the artistic direction of Alessandra Polveroni, together with the collaboration of Valentina Ciarallo.

Simona Marchini, well known actress and gallery owner of Nuova Pesa, exhibits a variety of pictures that document the gallery’s activity spanning forty years, since her father opened the space in Rome in 1959.

The Gallerati Gallery sets up Ultimate Landscape, a cycle of photos by Claudio Orlandi dedicated to the theme of global warming and an installation of a real glacier-saving sheet that makes you think about the future of our planet.

B-Art gallery located in Trastevere presents a visually attractive display of twenty photographs from Jacopo Di Cera’s project MiRo, during the Roma Arte in Nuvola, booth H31, from the 18th to the 21st of November 2021.

The color pictures, taken by the artist from the same train car window during his ten years of commuting to work from Milan to Rome and return, represent an intimate and existential photo project where he explores the idea of traveling and expands the limitations of perception and imagination on a daily commute. In MiRo, Jacopo Di Cera plays with the meaning of the title itself, giving it a symbolic connotation. In fact, while the first syllables stand for the route destinations, Milan and Rome, at the same time ‘miro’ evokes the verb ‘mirare’ from Latin in the first person, meaning ‘I look’ and ‘I admire’.
The images recorded with fresh eyes from a train, challenge the concept of a routine work trip, of an anonymous public space, the monotonous non-place of commuters where one passively waits until arriving at destination. Instead they communicate a sense of adventure, and discovery, where the experience is lived with the excitement of the first time.
The sequence of color photographs printed directly on glass and mounted on a black metal frame shaped like a train window, remind one of stills from a film and is visually intriguing.
The artworks stand for windows to an ever-changing landscape illustrating scenes like a sunflower field, the graffiti-covered façade of an industrial building, two parked trains facing each other and stacks of hay bales, among others.

On the side walls one can see works from his other photo projects ‘Until the end of the sea’ (2016) which explores the topic of migration. Here photographs are printed directly on wood pieces taken from the migrants’ boats in Lampedusa and ‘The noise of absence’ (2016) that explores what is left of Amatrice after the devastating effects of the earthquake. One image showing a torn pack of cigarettes scattered among the rubble, is printed on a thin wrinkled photo paper in order to emphasize a sense of the fragility of life. The three-dimensional aspect that is common in all three projects highlights the symbolic and existential meaning present in his oeuvre and makes of each image a sculpural artwork. 

Matilde Damele
www.matildedamele.net