The sky is in the ice

This event is an exhibition in the space of Kou Gallery, promoter of Rome Art Week: even in the latitudes of Rome, the advanced experiences of collective spaces and workshop laboratories of contemporary art are presented, factories of "associated" creativity, production and exhibition, which interact with the territory of settlement and show the evolution of the present era.

Collective experiences, such as Rione Placido, fit well in the important and interactive initiative of Rome Art Week, which highlights the network, the mapping of contemporary art in the city, with number and high quality and originality of protagonists and events, among which precisely important the factory workshops, open studios, artist residencies and especially collective spaces.

An innovative experience of production of confrontation and relationships. From masters, schools, art academies to young people: as Quintilian already said, from the seed to the roots to the trunk. The collective art spaces are characterized as an original and avant-garde species of "made in Italy" and "made in Rome," which characterizes the creativity of our country and the Capital.

In a narrow artistic sense, new identifications are presented alongside reinterpretations and interrogations, with representations from the micro to the macro, from abstractionism to the figurative, from nature to science and technology.

The artist is even more stimulated to confront and enter into the merits, from the point of view of artistic and aesthetic sensibility, of social, ethical, ecological, and technological issues, with art becoming, albeit in its autonomy, also a representative and interpretative element of reality and social change, especially in the current geological era of the Anthropocene, in which man interacts and influences - with his actions and his culture - the environment and the whole Earth.

Rione Placido as a whole collective space presents itself as an Iceberg, partly visible and partly invisible: it shows a part of itself, hiding everything else from us.

The iceberg reverses this perceptual pattern over time, almost rotates on itself. It shows an ability to dissimulate itself: though colossal, very apparent, it recedes from view and vanishes into the haze, silently. It then reappears in sight, when no longer expected, with a light presence in comparison to its relevant size. An object in the landscape, a silent and mysterious mineral, as mineral and inert and mysterious is the majority of matter in the cosmos. The components are diamonds pierced by the sun's rays, polished. But they are also vanitas: when they are sought after by sailors, explorers who also often see their ambitions and vessels shipwrecked. The iceberg evokes the whole geological history and architecture of the universe.

In Rione Placido we detect acoustic impressions, a solid yet moving appearance, like the iceberg and the snow. Snowflakes move and travel thanks to the wind, with a constitutive instability: they then become ice crystals, snowfields, glaciers, until with time and heat they melt and become water again. A pulsating and exchange zone in nature.

And these new collective realities also interact with the territory, the neighborhood, the Settlement Ward, with mutual cultural growth and influence, as in Prenestino and Pigneto. The latter is the settlement neighborhood of Rione Placido, in Via Placido Zurla, a street in the Pigneto neighborhood, which has become a creative place for young people, a redeveloped territorial area that sees the development of a relevant and significant cultural and economic inducement.

Rione Placido is an art studio that was born in the fall of 2022-January 2023 in Rome, at the initiative and from the design union of the minds and hands of Eleonora Bona, Alice Colacione, Tiziano Conte, Denise Montresor, Mattia Cleri Polidori and Paolo Vitale. The artists share the need to jointly initiate an atelier that is not only a production site but a platform for contemporary aesthetic research. Rione is in the premises of a former confectionery workshop, which the artists decide to take over and transform precisely into a "rione," like the working-class neighborhood in which it is located, dynamic for art and culture in the capital. A renovation - from the previous industrial use - to the new cultural destination, a large open space, without dividing walls between the ateliers of the individual artists it houses: an absence of dividing walls as a symbolic and praxis testimony of an open, changing, flexible, free direction of artistic research and production. With varied and synergistic methodologies, also with use of advanced technologies, with a language proper to contemporary art, moving from abstraction to form and in relation as mentioned with the territory of settlement and in dialogue with other artistic and cultural realities, local and also of the whole city.

Rione Placido represents a factory of production, creativity, presentation of emerging artists, and also of comparisons with historical, present and Academy Masters, such as Vincenzo Scolamiero, their specific Master.

Rione Placido is as said an open space, with mutual contaminations among the component artists. It is an island, an art collective: from the figurative to the abstract, from the micro to the macro, from the material to the immaterial, from the tradition of media and subjects to the new technologies, from the physical material to the digital, as a whole of a happy island, of whose creativity in the first place only part can be seen, like a submerged iceberg, from the visible to the veiled, from the manifest to the occult: with a continuous dialogue between tradition and new artistic expressions.

The collective also expresses a dynamism, a continuous unstable balance, as between the cold and the hot, between the liquid and the solid, between the amorphous and the continuous pulsations of a vital movement, between the life that evolves and the mineral that stands.

Like each individual artist, the collective is also a planet unto itself, orbiting in the cosmos, a happy island in which to search and in which to find answers to the eternal questions of humanity: who we are where we come from and where we are going. Artists are similar to Epicurus' Atoms: infinite and autonomous, to compose combinations of infinite worlds, remote and near. Unique as unique is their Collective whole!

Then the experience for the public to go, to go directly to the artists, especially in collective spaces, to the places of creativity and ingenuity, finding welcome and direct and deep, not superficial relationship with the works and the artists themselves, is to be emphasized. As already by experts and operators of the art system: a practice that has always been followed by curators critics scholars merchants, the so-called insiders. But a practice that increasingly, and with growing participation, also happens by the general public, involved for example in open studios of individual artists and precisely in openings and exhibitions in collective spaces. And the collective space, like the open studios already, thus also becomes an experience of a different exhibition space, other than museums and galleries, a space represented precisely by the place where art is produced. A place, a familiar island where visitors feel at home.

The decorative, sculpture, painting, textiles, the use of advanced technologies-from videos to software and algorithms-experiences of painting and creativity even live painting, a reading of colors other come together in a fusion of ideas and achievements, precisely with the mentioned mutual contaminations.

Leit motiv among the collective experiences and among the artists, as in that of Rione Placido, is the evolution of contemporary art, the development of autonomy of art and abstraction, as in Gerhard Richter (whom they all declare to appreciate strongly).

And the studios, the spaces themselves like Rione Placido, from simple containers, become themselves works of art.

The artistic evolution, represented by the experience under consideration, really distinguishes the latitudes of contemporary Rome: a city in which the meanings of art are expanded, from tradition and antiquity to modernity, from depth to light. As if to confirm the sustainability and continuation of life, of humanity, of the earth system, even in the cited era of the Anthropocene. Truly such experiences as Rione Placido with its artists stand among the innovative and avant-garde protagonists of these times, in the artistic, cultural and social fields.