MENU
RETROPHUTURE Fabrizio Passarella 'DREAMS In the Realm of Penumbrae'
Video Installation Drawings Digital Works 2022/25 October 4 2025 | 5 pm - 9 pm
RETROPHUTURE Fabrizio Passarella 'DREAMS In the Realm of Penumbrae' 2025 Courtesy artista e L'ARIETE artecontemporanea
4 October 2025
Sat: 17:00 – 21:00
Descrizione

An event conceived not as an exhibition but as a complex project, a large-scale installation composed of a large video/sound projection, a series of drawings, digital works, and lightboxes, and a book of images and poetic texts. The limited-time exhibition aims to highlight its extraordinary, dream-like quality, which cannot be repeated or prolonged. The artist has long been reflecting on a more evanescent, less aggressive art, one that requires less physical space and more meditation, and that reproduces the mechanisms of the mind and perception. A project that can be projected, transforming the space, creating a brief, magical moment before vanishing. The project is the distillation of over two years of work. From the image of a neoclassical angel from Capodimonte, the world of metaphysics and surrealism resurfaced in the artist unconsciously and in a Jungian manner, through a sort of visual automatism that combined poetic cues, dream fragments, hypnagogic visions, memories, and a retrofuturist imagery, gathered first through psychic iconographic research and then through the use of AI. The dreamlike nature of the compositions—and the writing on a building in the "metaphysical city" of Tresigallo—inspired the overall title and those of the individual works. It was like returning to the primitive purity of the symbol reflected in the clarity of lines of the beautiful rationalist architecture that had inspired and been inspired by metaphysical painting and the Neue Sachlichkeit. An escape from the delirious semiological and semantic traffic jam of indications, slogans, red herrings, Orwellian oxymorons, and brazen visual assaults in which we are submerged. Especially at a time when, as the author writes, "the old European Titanic, in full decline, seems to be on the brink of its third and probably final suicide in the space of a century. This series of works reflects the nostalgic sweetness of a future never truly fulfilled and the poignant melancholy for the sinking of a continent that always seems destined to reach dizzying heights of beauty and refinement only to then cyclically devour itself. All this is immersed in an atmosphere of dim light and infinite perspectives, where mythological characters wear lamé and Viennese tailcoats, waltzing between and with gigantic centerpieces in Central European porcelain. Images primarily refer to the parasurrealist poetry of Yvan Goll and Paul Celan, among the greatest poets of the last century. It was surprising and fascinating to see the myth and classical deities re-emerge in an unexpected and unmistakable way, almost as if the collective soul of Europe were expressing itself in a sort of electronic automatism, confirming Hillman's thesis according to which the gods have hidden in the folds of the modern world or, as Gustav Jung understood well, paraphrasing the oracle of Delphi: WHETHER YOU INVOKE HIM OR NOT, GOD IS STILL PRESENT.

L'ARIETE artecontemporanea
View on map
Via Marsili 7, 40124, Bologna, BO, Italy
Contatto
L'ARIETE artecontemporanea
Via Marsili 7, 40124, Bologna, BO, Italy
Telefono: 3489870574
Instagram:
Facebook:facebook.com
We use cookies to optimize our website and services.Read more
This website uses Google Analytics (GA4) as a third-party analytical cookie in order to analyse users’ browsing and to produce statistics on visits; the IP address is not “in clear” text, this cookie is thus deemed analogue to technical cookies and does not require the users’ consent.
Accept
Decline