One foot in the world and the other in the stillness

ALESSANDRO ROMA
One foot in the world and the other in the stillness
February 20th – May 28th, 2016

On a lovely and far-wandering walk a thousand useful and usable thoughts occur to me. Shut in at home I would miserably decay and wither. Walking is for me not only healthy, and lovely, it is also of service and useful. A walk advances me professionally, and provides me at the same time also with amusement and joy; it refreshes me and comforts and delights me, is a pleasure for me, and simultaneously, it has the peculiarity that it allures me and spurs me on to further creation, since it offers me as material numerous small and large objectivities upon which I later work at home, diligently and industriously. A walk is always filled with significanty phenomena, which are valuable to see and feel.
(Robert Walser, The Walk)

z2o Sara Zanin Gallery is pleased to present One foot in the world and the other in the stillness, the first solo exhibition by Alessandro Roma at the gallery.
Alessandro Roma plays with the notions of perceiving what is undefined: if on the one hand his works are linked to the classic themes of landscape painting tradition, on the other hand they explore their boundaries and shirk formal techniques in favour of an on-going melding between memory and imagination.
Nature, Roma's preferred theme, is interpreted as an enchanted place where on-going and unforeseeable metamorphoses take place, generated by the unpredictability of a "free" vision and at the same time by the attempt to fix them, through mastery, in new formal structures.
Signs of natural, not fully recognisable shapes leave enough room for viewers to constantly and newly re-interpret the image. His works tend to elicit a special kind of catharsis of the eye, by inviting the viewer to plunge into a personal labyrinth of memories, references and suggestions.

Images lead towards a state between slumber and wakfulness we could define as reverie. Imagination plays a central role in the artist's practice: both at the onset of the work production and in its fruition.
These are instants of a fragmented space capable of recomposing itself – rather magically, in a dream-like unit within a resonating balance where the subconscious dimension emerges as a fundamental value.

Alessandro Roma (Milan, 1977) lives and works in London. His works have been shown in many solo exhibitions: Locus Amoenus (Sobering Gallery, Paris, 2014); Coburn Projects (London, 2015) Enclosure (Paradise Row Gallery, London, UK, 2013); Humus (Mart Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rovereto, 2011); Sites of action (Scaramouche Gallery, New York, 2011). A selection of his recent group exhibitions include: Drawing (z2o Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, 2014), Drawing Biennial 2015 (Drawing Room, London), Everything is About to Happen, G. Magnani (Corvi Mora, London, 2014); Lucie Fontaine: Estate (Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, 2012).