The La Nuvola Gallery hosts the collective exhibition L’impresa e l’Opera, with creations dedicated by the artists of the Spazio Ombrelloni di San Lorenzo, invited, for the first time to Via Margutta, to adhere to a common concept inspired by the themes outlined by the film Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, Fitzcarraldo (1982).
The hero intends to build an Opera House in the middle of the Amazon forest, in the place nicknamed by the Indians “Cayahari Yacu”, meaning “the land where God did not complete creation”. Fitzcarraldo, contaminated by a growing “perfection fever” as a torment to be eradicated, bends events to his imagination, to the point of crossing a hill with a ship and, while he is about to succeed in the undertaking, on the brink of a new life, starts to sink.
The forest is, perhaps, the place in which to strive for the best part of oneself, along the ethnological vision of mnemic residues and mythical references, which are fragmented along the narrative exposition. The themes of art hover here as a human distillate in relationship with nature, and as exoticism that surpasses the sense of destination and civil society; the extreme will of the individual; the dreamlike power of the ideal. The invited artists propose their own interpretative gesture, in a contemporary perspective of ancient themes.
“I suggested directing a look at Fitzcarraldo, glimpsing a point of contact between the productions of the authors on display and the surreal and restless, visionary and alienated, winning and defeated, alone and followed, aware and delirious hero, elegantly dressed in a white suit soiled by his business. There is, perhaps, a subtle common thread between this hero and many artists of all time.”
Photography by Domenico Flora
