In the setting of the Botanical Garden of Rome, an evocative installation inside the French greenhouse where, to accompany the large canvases of the trees of the Moving Forest, 25 small oval canvases with the portraits of the Greenscovery Masters, the botanists whose insights have uncovered the mysterious web of connections that unites every point on our verdant planet, are on show for the first time.
The boundless cosmogony of Ria Lussi, alien artist, becomes immortal thanks to luminous, transparent and durable materials like Murano glass, stained glass and neon. The chromatic matrix of her creatures are hand-painted with ink on precious silk canvases… As an activist artist, she works ingoodcompanywith an excellent community of researchers, designers and artisans, and she believes that art is a primary need: Art can be inclusive, generous and sustainable! Within the Art Studios she hosts two young talents whom she supports in their artistic research: the cyanotype portrait photographer Anna Di Paola and the street jewellery artist Alessandro Sabong, known as 13TRUTH. She’s an expert in communication and education and her activities are powered by Arkage of Art Attack Group, a B Corp communication company, which she co-founded. With her projects, Ria Lussi supports the non-profit WeWorkItWorks.org in Madagascar.
Ria Lussi prefers an apparent fragility that increases the iconographic pathos, while re-proposing the aesthetic theme by incorporating the surface with its multiple depths in the different levels of transparency. Think about it, it’s no small thing that an artist manages to engage so deeply with the epidermises, breaking the arts & crafts of certain “popular” materials. Glass, neon or the illuminations transmute without losing their identity, cutting abnormal trajectories as only artists can make happen. Non-conforming trajectories are the blue-print of Ria’s inventive biology: and we see the cornerstones of humanistic thought (her references to philosophical and literary texts are many) giving form to a new iconic species, endowed with memory and vision, empathic by nature, alien in so far it is “other”.
Gianluca Marziani
Second Act Around Giordano Bruno
Light operetta in three acts, with epilogue.
“What are you doing, Hope, not surprising me, not prompting me?”
Resuming the ancient technique of luminaries, Ria Lussi build a 7-meter-high art work dedicated to Spoleto, a call for rebirth and optimism after the tragic earthquake of 2016. Presented by Gianluca Marziani, in collaboration with Municipally of Spoleto and Collicola Palace Visual Arts, the installation, is born from a pluriannual work of Ria Lussi on Giordano Bruno and on his book “Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante”. During the event the artist’s book will be distributed, in a limited edition, translated in contemporary Italian by Daniele Teclemariam and with the linguistic advice of Agata Azzellini, introduced by fifteen emblematic Ria Lussi’s drawings.
When I draw, it is usually with a black Bic pen. No turning back is allowed. The mediums I like to use are neon, silk, glass because they are all fragile and yet resilient materials. They maintain a shiny, almost inappropriate luminosity and at the same time, like human life, they could break in a moment. On the cosmogony of beings that spring (persistently) from my pen, I don’t say nothing. To those that meet them, interpret…
“Who is afraid of pink?”
Rome, Maja Arte Contemporanea Gallery.
Catalogue texts by Gloria Fossi, Umberto Palestini, Roberto Valenti.
From September 1 to November 13, 2021.
