Arcangelo – The Nineties
Rome, 23 January – 20 April 2024
Arcangelo
The Nineties
23 January – 20 April 2024
Rome
Piazza Pia 1, Via della Conciliazione 4, 00193 Rome, RM
Tuesday – Saturday, 1 pm – 7 pm
Preserved in archives for over thirty years, a corpus of unpublished canvases and drawings, documenting Arcangelo’s first journey to West Africa, is presented to the Roman public for the first time.
MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea is pleased to present the second exhibition project in the Roman gallery located at Piazza Pia, 1. The exhibition dedicated to the artist Arcangelo showcases a series of unpublished works created in 1992, two years after his crucial journey to Africa.
In the canvases exhibited, black still dominates, as in works from the 1980s, but it also returns as a sign and plays a role in defining form, leaving greens to construct the image’s temperature. It’s the color of the West African prairies or the green of forests covering plains and promontories: a color rendered vivid and dazzling by the intensity of African light and by contrasts with the heavy black cuts of shadows. Completing the exhibition path are a series of canvases and drawings from the same period, dated 1991, where black becomes an increasingly graphic sign with few represented spots, while vague traces of color resemble blue and yellow glimmers in a white sky.
Arcangelo continued to delve into physical and sensory immersion in nature, in contact with the vital energies and sacredness of the African continent, measuring his language with the “primary experience” at the sources of the world’s history and culture. Also exhibited are some works from the early 2000s, which gather the graphic heritage of the 1990s but represent the turning point, in terms of color themes, of the works of the following years. Concurrently with Arcangelo’s exhibition in Rome at our gallery, the artist will present a project for Franco and Daniela Nucci of the Volume! Foundation.
“My solid roots and the sense of total belonging to my land have made me free to go beyond and discover all the lands that I have chosen to visit and narrate through empathy. My works speak of my personal ‘connection’ to things as if already lived through atmospheres close in colors, traditions, songs, legends with my land of origin. I am a man deeply rooted in the history of the South, but of that South of the world.”
It is by virtue of this great strength and awareness that the journey to the African continent, that movement towards a destination, towards another than oneself, marks a change in Arcangelo’s imagery. The journey to Mali strongly and immediately impacts the artist’s pictorial evolution, bringing forth an iconography increasingly inclined towards coloring, through a “matter/color” fusion. From contacts with tribal civilizations of the Niger River Delta arise the first works of the Lobi-Dogon cycle, presented at the Kunstverein in Bonn in 1991, and continue in the subsequent series titled after the Dogon of 1994. The value of rediscovering an unpublished yet already historicized pictorial cycle offers new possibilities for interpreting Arcangelo’s art, adding a new piece to the understanding of his pictorial evolution.