SERGIO LOMBARDO – FORTUITA EVENTA
Curated by Alice Falsaperla
La Nuvola Contemporary Gallery in Via Margutta is honoured to host, on Friday 21 March 2025 at 6 pm, the new solo exhibition dedicated to Sergio Lombardo (Rome, 1939), curated by Alice Falsaperla and in collaboration with the Sergio Lombardo Archive, with the participation of Stella D’Argenzio and Fabio Ianniello. The event, sponsored by the Municipality of Rome and the Roman Rorschach School, exhibits an aspect of Stochastic Painting – generative algorithmic art – one of the most characteristic inventions of Lombardo’s avant-garde research.
The adjective ‘stochastic’ (from Ancient Greek ‘to draw lots’) denotes the mathematical calculation of probability; it becomes synonymous with ‘random’ to measure the aleatory nature of events that vary according to non-deterministic laws. Chance is predominant here, starting from the title, a continuation of the last exhibition in the historical spaces of La Nuvola, From Monochromes to Typical Gestures, and as a homage to Maurizio Calvesi who, referring to Lombardo, quotes Plutarch: «We are somewhere between Rorschach’s blots and a vision of the world as a hypothetical order created by Chance, according to a current conception, but one that is at least as old as Plutarch; who wrote that nature is constituted in the Latin tradition “ex eventi fortuiti, quando fortuita eventa ordine inter se sortiuntur”».
The project focuses on a particular process, called Quilting (2017), which consists of a set of seemingly meaningless shapes assembled through stochastic black and white tessellations.
The distinctive element of this exhibition lies in the exclusive presence of works on paper, characterised by Minimality, Completeness, Compactness and Toroidality. In the background is the Hazard canvas, a synthesis of a further suggestive pictorial mode.
The exhibition, open to the public until the 11th of April 2025, has a mathematical, aesthetic, historical and documentary character. The value of Lombardo’s experimentation makes evident the generating impulse to retain the total involvement of the viewer, his physical and psychic engagement, to the point of influencing his life, the unknown randomness and the psychic worlds that inhabit it.
«But is it an order or a disorder, the one that the ‘fortuita eventa’ provoked by the eventualist Lombardo most secretly aspire to? An inseparably scientific and artistic way of looking at the unknown within us, without any concession to mystery. An artistic way that wants to remove mystery from art in order to add unpredictability to life, and a scientific way to react to the residual, ineliminable suggestions of art, transforming them into entities that can be analysed».
(Maurizio Calvesi, 1995)
