La Nuvola Gallery in Via Margutta opens, on Thursday, April 4 at 6 p.m., Sergio Premoli’s solo exhibition, entitled Il Circo della Vita (The Circus of Life), curated by Eva Bellini. This is an exhibition, under the patronage of the artistic-cultural association EVA – Energies of Visual Art and the International Academy of Theater in Rome, which takes on multiple values on the current scene: historical, since it is an internationally known author, linked both to the artists of the School of Piazza del Popolo, of which the Gallery is a spokesman, and to those of American Pop Art, embracing the creative experiments of those years.
There is, moreover, a biographical relevance, since this occasion documents the author’s present-day reunion with the place from which his artistic past originated: Via Margutta and the studio he lived in for years, before his move to the United States and then to Sweden. Finally, there is a valence related to a critical investigation, deepened through texts by Eva Bellini, Dalmazio Frau and Alice Falsaperla, the event’s organizer.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, this is the first exhibition in the Gallery’s historical spaces of one of Premoli’s most iconic productions, through which the author retraces a theme dear to him, such as that of the “Circus,” which stems from his childhood and flows into Art, thickening into reassuring icons and, at the same time, repositories of inexorable disquiet. In fact, the artist recounts, “I have always been fascinated by clowns, in whom resides one of the greatest powers of the Circus, precisely because of the direct communication they manage to weave with individuals. They have transformed me because, by hiding one identity, they always reveal another truth.”
In the nights and days chasing each other between Rome and Los Angeles, the artist chooses, thus, to intervene pictorially, in the pages of the Financial Times. The artist conceals, under the features of clowns, the silhouettes of men of power, returning them unrecognizable to the public.
This character, identifiable by his floured face and puffy suit, is “the man under-over, the forward-backward, the yes-and-no.” And, here, in Premoli’s poetics, it lands on something further, playing out one of the central challenges of man in his process of individuation.
The author’s pictorial action insists on identity and turns to the alteration of connotations and colors, ever since the time of the emblematic cover he made for the film The Doors (1991), written and directed by Oliver Stone.
If, at first glance, a biting satire is evinced, at a later stage “the more hilarious feelings begin to surface until the more uneasy ones emerge, permeated by the rules that tend to frame the social system and our minds.”
Premoli’s Pagliacci, notes from a life diary, are fragments of an itinerary that restore suggestions and stage an exhibition environment in which the visitor is magically involved, allowing himself to be guided in the search for meaning that tends from individual to collective.
In addition to this selection of works on paper, three of the artist’s oil on canvas paintings, Adam, Eve and Last Supper, also symbols of a universal narrative, will also be on display until April 13.
