Four Rooms is a group show in four stages, in which five young Neapolitan artists – Luca Mattei e Carlotta Sennato, Giulio Delvè, Corrado Folinea, Celesta Bufano – have the opportunity to display their works in a public context and, at the same time, be confronted with the experience of exposing in a museum. The exhibitions is accompanied by four texts, each written by a young Arts student at the University of Naples “l’Orientale”, who has been selected by professor Rossella Bonito Oliva to measure himself with contemporary artistic research and imagination.
Room 4
Celesta Bufano, Living room, 2008
text by Fortuna Del Prete: …Among suffocating obstructions and air outlets…
Fortuna Del Prete’s composition has the rhythm of African women’s songs. She tries to get into the artist’s whirling world and stop it for a moment so as to tell us what she saw reading her thoughts that go backwards.
…I had no choice but to sit on the clean sofa, darned with wonderful tapestry. It drew everyone’s attention. And the music was fantastic. Fantastic ethnic popular radical visceral poor.
The room was packed. A room a garden a paradise. The Paradise of the Few. But a popular one. Getting into a space and filling it completely, with lights, colours, sheets, papers brushes pictures dolls present past desk computer….. ahhhhhh….it’s so beautiful….but it suffocates me.
Unease. It’s too full. Too much everything. Too much.
You have Paradise. You have Earth. You have a panoramic outlook. A third eye. And movements that make one think of a perpetual state of exception. Picture. Stop. Picture. Stop.
What is there behind the house? What is there behind the room? Is there a behind? Yes yes yes. Take off your shoes, put your feet into the wet fertilized heavy earth. Which binds your feet and immobilizes your body. Come to think of it, I would stay here, in this paradise. It seems foolish, carving out a room, a room of my own, out of time. Where I make bread with my hands and the smell of tangerines and lemons and basil inebriates me. I become so inured that I almost want to run away. Maybe behind a tree or on a tree, feeling the beauty of one single moment and its precariousness.
And then falling down.
The rope was too loose, the game didn’t work well. The risk was too high. I could have got hurt. Naaay. The ground is wet, full of water, the earth would have held me back, cradled me. “Every place is like home”, after all, or maybe it is a new home. It always takes some time to get accustomed to the smells of the houses. Home sweet home. I can smell home, this sweater smells home…mmmhhh…the food. Home. Cosiness. You look for it in other people’s gestures, in the look of the other person coming from the opposite direction and almost touching you, same side, same pace. You go back home. Your home. Where your room is. A mess that is not a real mess, but rather a rule to be created. I scramble and overlay. It’s fun. Halfway between a 3D photo album and imagined imageries, archived yet shown. It’s probably because of this smoke, or maybe it is an attempt to trace a mental journey and to show it to those who come and see me in this corner of paradise. You’re invited, too. I’ll make you roll between the walls of the room and I’ll let you re-invent everything, from scratch, I’ll let you create the time of your journey, I’ll take you by the hand through the hallucinations of the journey.
If you want, I’ll put some music on…
Duerme, duerme negrito
Que tu mama estas nel campo, negrito
…trabajando, trabajando duramente
Trabajando si
Trabajando e no le pagan…
Por negrito chiquitito, por negrito si
Apumba chicapumba chicapum
Every journey is driven by a primordial melody, like the background of research and experimentation, of the most immediate creation. It sets the pace of actions, makes sense of thoughts and emotions. The experiential path of the self longs for what is beyond, but – quite primitively – it feeds on what has already been, on what we couldn’t get to know in deep and of what we just had a glimpse. The pleasure of starting from imagination, of deconstructing common lifestyles, always playing the game of life, through the emotional yoke of life, on the acrobat’s tightrope, on men’s earth, among suffocating obstructions and air outlets.
Catching a glimpse of the horizon and getting there.
Yesterday night I fell from the bicycle. I skinned my elbows and scratched my nose, my hands were fine, just a little reddened. I was far from home. My legs could hardly carry me any longer.
Yesterday I had a late night. I wasted Time.
I was rolling in the colourful shapes of my closed eyes.