Alessandro Roma: "Sites of Action"

Opening: Saturday, February 26, 6-8pm

Exhibition Dates: February 26 - April 17, 2011

Scaramouche is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Milan-based artist Alessandro Roma. With a series of collages and sculpture, "Sites of Action" derives its title from a preface to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the exhibition utilizes that novel's fantastical underground landscapes to re-articulate, through abstraction and allegory, our given perceptions of reality and representation, depth and dimension, interchanging page and object with discrete, spatial gestures.

The novel's imagery is referenced by a group of collages. The text's underground caves and waterways are rendered oblique and ambiguous with oil, fabric, magazine images, spray paint, and paper. In I scan the horizon then pure and free of all haze, swaths of jagged patterns and textures are layered atop one another and juxtaposed with a photograph of mountains and trees. Similarly, I tried to bring my ideas back to things of the earth places stalagmite-like images, gestural marks, and layers of spray paint in close adjacency, evoking Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists' formal experiments with color, scale, signification, and depth. Expanding upon these relationships, two sculptures, seemingly carved out from Roma's earthen imagery, round out the exhibition; extending pictorial space into three-dimensions, both page and object attain similar traits as one dimension articulates the other.

De-constructing landscapes of collage and sculpture, "Sites of Action" continues Roma's critical explorations of medium-specificity. Combining painting, fabric, and images, Roma's collages are defiantly interdisciplinary, conflating sign, symbol, and literary source-material to evoke both avant-garde history and the present day.

The opening reception will be accompanied by a complimentary, limited-edition offset-print, signed by the artist. The reverse will feature an interview between Alessandro Roma, Marco Antonini, and Lucie Fontaine.

Alessandro Roma (b. 1977, Milan, Italy) finished studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 2000 and participated in the Residence Kunstlerhauser Worpswede, Germany in 2009. Recent exhibitions include "Humus," a solo exhibition at Mart - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Rovereto e Trento, Italy, which is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Giorgio Verzotti and Francesco Stocchi, "Snooze" at Scaramouche c/o Fruit and Flower Deli, "Impresa pittura" at the International Center for Contemporary Art, Rome, "Vicarius" at Galerie Alexandra Saheb, Berlin, "Expanded Painting" at the Prague Biennial 4, and "Il sogno è anche un luogo ideale per il desiderio di giustizia" at Lucie Fontaine, Milan. Roma lives and works in Milan.