Memory exercises - Romanoleli
by Mariano Cipollini
The supremacy of appearance, favoured by the immediacy of visual communication often linked to new technologies, exponentially speeds up the interpretations and dissemination of artistic expressions’ canonical paths. Cultural and relational experimental processes read as knowledge achievements and free creation, diverted in some cases onto exemplary lanes built on cultural flattening, undergo a "lightening" of no small importance. It does not matter if the content is easily perishable, the essential need is the one of an immediate impact, a rapid access and, if desired, an easily replaceable.
“Esercizi di Memoria”, a review of Romanoleli's works, on the contrary, gives us a clear signal of how the narrative necessity, the temporal sedimentation of cultural processes eluding superficial requests, are fundamental in his work and in the construction of a renewing thought. Cultural processes resulting from innovative paths closely linked with historical memory and critical rereading are fundamental for narrating and describing ourselves. In doing so, he re-establishes a connection and consequentiality between his present works’ experiments and a transversal relationship with his past artistic experiences.
The exhibition hosted in the Art Space of the Museo delle genti d’Abruzzo in Pescara coordinated by Alessandra Moscianese and open to visitors from 26 November to 11 December 2022 focuses its attention on these themes both from a structural and historical point of view. The exhibition itinerary is a clear example of developments that have distant roots.
Starting from a robust knowledge of artistic experiences from the second half of the 1950s, he delves into and investigates the relationships between sign and colour, visual perception and formal composition.
He is not concerned on about how much his analysis traces can lead us back to previous experiences which, far from being citations, return a new creative re-enactment.
Essential scans that serve as a palimpsest to develop the intimate conversation of a poetic narration over time. The works presented attempt to create an ex-novo that contains all its proper knowhow, not as a mere re-enactment of facts, but as a possible expressive path that combines memory and invention.
Overlays of meanings which, when added together, actually give us a whole in which colour, light and sign translate into credible new visions.
Chromatisms that rise to incorporeal but substantially tangible volumetric thicknesses. Different materials that do not deny their original nature. By fusion, due to the chosen colours, they generate overlaps that determine new figures aimed at personal yet recognisable iconic images. The renewed stylistic contours in which the sign, read as a trace and border between different surfaces, lives and emerges as the protagonist.
Works that are clear creatives path that add something to what has been already experienced. Clear demonstrations of how the artist's creativity, the result of reflection and experimentation, encountering past experiences, generates substance free from the “here and now” perishability.
A set that manages to underline how the profound knowledge of the contents and his executive gestural mastery can only establish a broader equivalence between the historical investigations and the progressive narrative needs of their author.
Romanoleli - Tensions, veils and introspection
by Cecilia Buccioni
Romanoleli combines the experience of sedimentation of cultural stories and processes with his historical-artistic studies and his in-depth analysis, having the aim of building his own narrative. He gradually encounters all those mechanisms based on the dynamic interaction among sign, gesture and colour, and from the echoes and the formal compositions of the second half of the twentieth century, he elaborates his own visual modality, which he comes to present to the public's perception.
His totally self-taught approach allows him to focus on the relationships between significant and poetic elements, deeply examining the concrete implications that he transposes into his personal research, combining memory and creation. He initially focused on minimalism, experimenting with recycled fabrics and using absolute colours and absolute geometries, which supported his initial interest in design and rational abstraction.
A new analysis then joins this path which leads him to dig deeper, to independently undertake a new language, which delves into and, in a way, becomes introspection. In the newer works, ethereal volumes move in osmotic dynamics, within a stratified system, which captures the eye and entangles it at the various levels, in an attempt to understand their origin. The material superposition highlights the coexistence of multiple dimensions, which reciprocally influence each other in a minimal but continuous motion.
The thicknesses that the eye captures are thin and filtering, but they maintain a body outlining unstable images, which follow the lights and shadows of the environment in which they are located. The chosen colours favor this trend, giving labile boundaries that accentuate the mobile nature of the material surfaces, often creating a real rhythm that punctuates the vision. Through mixed techniques that combine fabric, painting and sculpture, Romanoleli generates volumes that find their space in contrasts, from earthy tones with brilliant touches of saturated blues, up to chronic and undefined greys, inhabited by green curves.
Waves and membranes describe agglomerations and shapes that seem to break through the three-dimensionality of the works, moving as if in an atmospheric box, suggesting a constant transformation, similar to the artist's own language. In doing so, he develops a process full of inputs, which is therefore never definitive, but continues with always new twists, alternating production and site-specific commissions. Romanoleli always puts himself to the test, testing and proceeding with apparent randomness in his free investigation, which is still ongoing.
In the “Seconda Pelle” project, which began in 2023, his work has continued through a research that implements a stronger hybridisation between painting and sculpture, creating floating but extremely present solids, with a never univocal polychrome range, rich in internal references. Unlike the previous “Espansioni e Intersezioni”, in fact, in this phase Romanoleli tackles in the “Sospensioni” the more complex structure of a discontinuous surface, which seems flat but hides upper and lower levels, which seems superimposed but in reality is based on plastic joints. The shaded archipelagos go beyond the official limit, thanks to the retractable frame, to invade the surrounding space, inviting the eye to delve into the slight chasms created by the alternation between carvings and additions of material, for a construction made of both negative and positive.
The even more intimate evolution is also underlined by the bold need to deconstruct the thin and lamellar membrane: “Seconda Pelle” is a series in which the animal coat, dotted with craters and small, bevelled relief islands, is stretched until it reaches its maximum extension. The corners touch the metal frame, in a nervous tangency that could cause this veil to explode at any moment: the precarious balance of tension anticipates the principle of unveiling to which the artist alludes. The epidermal maps are suspended in the void, animated by their changing nature, and manifest a changing, amplified identity, which suddenly comes completely out from the support, to enter the space of the seer, forcing into a tactile observation.
Between changes and identity. Romanoleli's second skin
by Antonio Zimarino
The term "second skin" evokes identity changes, transformations, adaptations but also ways of developing and inhabiting distinct places of one's person/personality. There is a "first skin", a first aspect of us, the one that has perhaps characterised us for a long time and the one by which many have identified us, but over time, in the transformations that life suggests, perhaps others aspects of us emerge, other personal "substances" that perhaps had always existed but which found it difficult to show, perhaps due to habit, reticence, modesty, or perhaps just due to a lack of appropriate conditions. However, there come times when we need to take the changes into account, observe them and be able to experience them, read them and "represent" them to ourselves and to the others: at first, different things begin to coexist in us without necessarily denying each other and then little by little, they integrate as a need for completeness, as a revelation of parts of oneself to oneself, and in a certain way, also as a revelation of oneself to the others, to those who have always seen a part, a side that was not the whole. Changing one's skin is therefore also a way of relating and rebuilding a new relationship with the world: new sensitivities open up, other places are observed, things are touched and perceived in a new and renewed relationship.
If this can be an acceptable anthropological - existential interpretation of "shedding one's skin", what could the "artistic form", the object, the material, the very constitution of the work that represents tell us?First of all, it is the formal solution of a work that always says better and that in any case says something else compared to any interpretative and conceptual suggestion that can be derived from a title: beyond the "change" metaphor, in appearance and sensitivity, these works formally indicate several other things: further and different.
Upon closer inspection, the objects and structures are neither properly sculptures nor properly images, despite having a strong spatial structure, despite being iconographically "abstract" and chromatically characterised. They are "volumes", presences in space and not descriptive or imaginary representations; they possess two sign-chromatic levels that can be perceived simultaneously in the transparencies within which the relationship between light - shadow, surface - and colour plays a decisive aesthetic and conceptual role. Surfaces and background, whichever way you look at them, do not show "two different things" but are almost identical, with notable but minimal variations and many "coincidences" that are slightly and variously superimposable or visually connectable. The chromatic and symbolic effect given by the "space", by the superposition, by the veiling, by the luminous variability generated between the surfaces is different: how to understand, how to read these visual data?
What works very well in my opinion is that these works give shape, volume, spatial presence to the signs and colours, and this giving shape and volume means giving presence, occupying space, defining space, defining itself by complexity and presence in a context and in front of the beholder.
By putting these suggestions together, one gets the impression that the author is communicating himself and the others his "presence", his belonging fully to a "poetic" space (poiein = doing, creating).
My impression is that this coexistence of surfaces, this "second skin”, it is not actually a sign of a "change" or transformation towards something else, but rather the underlining, the re-emergence, the visualisation of a process that has brought into relief and has defined a new more complex, more articulated, both of the work and of those who conceived it, identity.
The depth between the two "layers" makes us perceive them differently, even if the first and second "skins" (surfaces) are not actually different. Even though they are substantially the same, they now re-emerge, doubling themselves and making themselves seen in a different way: more complete, richer in tensions, veils and figures. Similar, barely variable, yet iridescent, mobile, alive, and animated by the light and the nuances of the signs and colours given not by the colour in itself but by the space between one surface and the other. The harmonic "variable", the richness of tones and signs, the completeness of the observer’s gaze is generated by coexistence, by what is enclosed between the surfaces of what appears and what comes into view between the two veils. Each part is the completeness and the continuation of the other and both are defined by the tones of light that passes through them.
It is not "transformation", but identity, awareness of a broader, more complex self: it is the same skin, the same person, but yet more "alive", more curious, more ecstatic, more enchanted than it was before.
Romanoleli - SECONDA PELLE
by Mariano Cipollini
The structure of thinking often requires a careful additional elements aggregation process that builds the essential framework and makes it communicable in its readability. The foundation of the underlying principles inherent in it allows us to access the understanding of the diversity that characterises everyone’s expressiveness, without prejudicing the variables that partly make up its evolution, the possibilities of modifications, dictated by factors linked to the succession of personal experiences.
The research Romanoleli intuitively carries out step into the perception modifiability we have in the thinking content translated into artwork. Maturity, which is the structuring basis of the analysis he elaborates, motivates him to explore both the narrative paths that represent him and the possible alternatives that distinguish his formal research and his possible evolution, which can be implemented through the simplification of the aesthetics concept.
Achievements recovered from past experiences and from the awareness of the completeness of time. Factors which, in this story, have a precise reason of existing: there is no defined moment that can circumscribe when and why narrating oneself becomes an urgent need.
The different experiences, sedimented over a few decades, can find the perfect meeting point with the creative gesture without a precise chronological order with often surprising dynamics. The simplicity of intent that distinguishes him leads us to believe in an even more linear vocation in making both things coincide, managing to have a clear and recognisable personal language. A credibility supported by narrative clarity that does not resort to superstructures to accommodate or mask mystifying intuitions. Visual paths in which the color scheme shapes volumes closely related to optical and light phenomena. The object comes to life from its desire to exist and changes according to the visual research that the artist has always carried out.
Overlays that materialise perceptible and changing dimensions, in which light and colour respond to the very laws of a virtual world constructed with wisdom through the tested combination of extremely different materials.
The same ones which attest to both a real physicality and a relativity in which the experimental value has a significant specific weight. A delicate compromise between visual perception and the supporting structure that generates it.
Glazing.
Stratifications of epidermis that respond, materialising in their mutability, to the stimuli of sight, evoking parts attributable to primordial finds.
Ephemeral protective structures ready to be converted into an evocative sign.
A strong relationship between the art work and the personal experience.
An intimate process, marked by almost extreme confidentiality.
Despite this, Romanoleli is willing to shed his first skin today, freeing himself from the constraints that have slowed down his artistic production over time, without compromising the evolutionary process, which is also well highlighted in the works on display.
He lays all his knowledge without filters.
It synthesises and connects several decades of experimentation with renewed artistic themes, managing to reveal what we were, what we are or what we will be.
Unique reading in its discursive simplicity.
A growing parable where all the case congruencies converge to make other revelation processes feasible in which subtraction has an additional value in strengthening the thinking - creative structure that contributes to modelling, at its best, the man and the artist.
Inner kaleidoscope, Romanoleli's research between aesthetics, intimacy and discovery
by Giovanna Dello Iacono
A filtered vision of the world, especially the artist’s internal one, which meet the challenge of revealing something intimate, never shown before, but to be researched by observing, composing a riddle with the overlapping of often unusual materials, which reveal themselves only after a careful observation. Hidden by stratification, poor elements are transformed into something superficially precious, corrugated cardboard is a robust framework, crystal, iron, metal hinges and polyethylenes give substance to three-dimensional works.
Though transparencies and ethereal hypo-visions, Romanoleli's works invite us to cross a past we did not live and a future we will not experience... they are kaleidoscopic passages where to get lost or where to reflect ourselves by changing angles, discovering the polymorphic nature that trains the eye to perceive and incorporate the world and people’s changes, bringing out dormant personal and identity traits. The works’ choral effect on display takes on different connotations and leads us to direct our gaze to a new perspective, crossing the most superficial layers, peering inside, renewing ourselves, shedding our skin.
Romanoleli
by Paolo Dell’Elce
For an artist, the daily necessity of making is often a sort of damnation, a condemnation. Artists are dominated by this condition and this sometimes leads them to yearn for liberation from this "slavery": freedom from making which corresponds to overcoming the object and all its semantic and symbolic connotations, which cancels out the noise and the plethora of meanings to arrive at the pure contemplation of silence as an original pre-linguistic instance.
In maturity, perhaps, a person is more willing to listen to artistic languages rather than to override them with youthful hubris, and Romanoleli managed to let that silent and private world that he had kept in great secret since his youth emerge thanks to his ability to listen and observe the world.
Romanoleli has resumed an ancient path at the point where many other artists before him had interrupted it, but it is not epigonism. It is not so to the extent that the genuineness of his work makes us perceive it as something that has been renewed, an attitude that arises precisely from the study of his own work and becomes personal, deeply felt.
A "second skin" which is another opportunity, perhaps another life and which Romanoleli is sedimenting as the previous one gradually peels away. A second skin that makes us thinking of reptiles, of Calvino's Iguana with its "evolved eye", “"with a gaze, attention, sadness, to give the idea that another being is hidden under those semblances of a dragon: an animal more similar to those with which we are familiar, a living presence less distant from us than it seems..."