Presentation of the exhibition: Luca Vitone. Io, Villa Adriana

The exhibition, a collaboration between MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, the Italian Cultural Institute of São Paulo, the Italian Embassy in Brazil, MAXXI and Hadrian’s Villa and Villa d’Este – VILLÆ, presents the work of Luca Vitone in the spaces conceived by Oscar Niemeyer. Over the course of his fruitful artistic trajectory, the Genoese artist has always made the complex relationship with environments the object of his research.
The axis of Vitone’s progressive encounters with Hadrian’s Villa, an imperial residence in Tivoli (Rome) dating back to the 2nd century AD, are the nine canvases, exhibited here, that name the exhibition: placed by the artist in various places of the Villa and left for months at the mercy of atmospheric agents, to whom the task of producing the image is fully delegated. The large canvases’ surface record the contact with the surrounding environment and the passage of atmospheric and chronological time, becoming self-portraits of Hadrian’s Villa. The walls present the Capricci, four engravings of Hadrian’s Villa designed by Piranesi, on which Vitone inserted notes by hand, as if a sound came from the ruins. Next to these prints are some findings of Hadrian’s Villa: three panels with fragments of painted plaster and a statue depicting the Egyptian deity Horus, in the shape of a falcon. The god symbolizes the sovereign’s power and divine role, concepts synthesized by the double crown (a tiara of Upper Egypt, a modius of Lower Egypt). The exhibition closes with the site-specific work Wunderkammer (thinking of the celestial dome), made with dust collected at the Observatory of Roccabruna, where emperor Hadrian carried out his astronomical studies. Vitone makes of dust a painting, treating it to obtain a useful raw material to create the piece and make it a trace of the peculiarity of the historical evolution that transformed Hadrian’s Villa from locus amoenus into an archaeological site.
The exhibition thus becomes an opportunity to go over the multiform inscription of Vitone in the historical tradition of landscape painting. His continuous disarticulation of the codified representations of places always aims at the incomprehensible aspects that characterize them. Since 2005, Vitone relies on the lightness of natural agents to leave the narrative of concrete and autonomous cartography in several places; and since 2000 he uses edible substances or dusts to create almost-monochromes, in which the continuous reference to the cultural complexity of places is accompanied, in some cases, by a reflection on power in Western society.