VITA DULCIS. PAURA E DESIDERIO NELL'IMPERO ROMANO

Palazzo delle Esposizioni 22 aprile – 27 agosto 2023 Al Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma dal 22 aprile al 27 agosto 2023, curata da Francesco Vezzoli e Stéphane Verger, la mostra VITA DULCIS – prodotta dall’Azienda Speciale Palaexpo e ideata insieme con il Museo Nazionale Romano e lo Studio Vezzoli – prende spunto dalla più recente produzione dell’artista per proporre al pubblico un inedito e sorprendente percorso che accosta arte contemporanea, archeologia e cinema.
2023

Review by Beatrice

The aesthetics triumph in the "dolce vita" of Francesco Vezzoli.

The sensation, that experience we have when dealing with beauty; the perception, the ability to feel when something captures our attention, producing an indefinable emotion: this happens in the rooms that make up the exhibition.

After all, life is sweet only if, not only fear, but above all desire accompany it.

Here, appeal is made to sentiment, to immediate bodily sensation, to a taste that resorts to a fundamental vagueness, to an irreducible indeterminacy.

You don't enter the house of "beauty" in Vita Dulcis, but the house of "something," where beauty is what pleases without interest, without concept, without the representation of an end, as Kant would say.

Here, life is sweet because even though it may seem enjoyable, as in the images of films projected with the symbolic eroticism and carnality of a fluid story that has crossed the centuries, there is nevertheless nothing defined, juxtaposed, balanced...

"The truth is said with laughter," as when in Ubi Potentia Regnat the heads of Marcus Aurelius and Domitian are grafted by the artist onto the bust of a female body, while in Mixtura Dementiae an attempt is made to provoke the gaze with irreverent interventions that arouse the search for the particular, the difference in artistic intervention on objects of post/pop classicism.

Between cinema, archaeology, imagination, elegant and irreverent setups, the talent blends the classical with the kitsch, dressing identities, symbols, icons, funerary inscriptions in seemingly superficial disguises and making them visible again because they are contaminated by a new way of seeing and the need to adopt another, hallucinated, deformed, reworked gaze.

Vita Dulcis explicitly expresses something necessary, the mode of making one feel that there is something that is still possible to say and that can never be fully said.

"Vita Dulcis inaugurates the new course of the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and actively relaunches the role of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni as a point of reference for the production and conception of unpublished exhibition projects, aimed at bringing Rome back to the center of the international cultural scene of the contemporary. With the exhibition presented today, we aim for a change of pace towards the realization of this ambitious design, which will also be carried forward through more impactful collaborations with world-class institutions and artists like Vezzoli," says Marco Delogu, president of Azienda Speciale Palaexpo.

"The National Roman Museum is delighted to initiate a fruitful collaboration with Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, thanks to which the public will discover, alongside some of the museum's well-known masterpieces, many little-known or even never-seen objects that we have pulled out of the extensive storage for the occasion of the exhibition. These 'Rediscovered Deposits' acquire a special meaning thanks to the extraordinary vision of Francesco Vezzoli, who projects ancient objects into a decidedly contemporary perspective: a double rediscovery, therefore, of the treasures of the National Roman Museum thanks to the initiative proposed with great foresight by Marco Delogu," adds Stéphane Verger, director of the National Roman Museum.

INFORMATION

PALAZZO DELLE ESPOSIZIONI

Rome, Via Nazionale, 194

www.pal azzoesposizioni.it

Facebook: @PalazzoEsposizioni | Instagram: @palazzoesposizioni | Twitter: @Esposizioni

Exhibition

VITA DULCIS

FEAR AND DESIRE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE Palazzo delle Esposizioni

April 22 - August 27, 2023

CURATED BY

Francesco Vezzoli

Stéphane Verger

OPENING HOURS

From Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM, closed on Mondays. Entry is allowed until one hour before closing.

TICKETS

The ticket is valid for all ongoing exhibitions. From April 22 to May 4

Full price €10.00 Reduced price €8.00

Children aged 7 to 18 €4.00

From May 5 to July 30

Full price €12.50 Reduced price €10.00

Children aged 7 to 18 €6.00

From August 1 to August 27

Full price €10.00 Reduced price €8.00

Children aged 7 to 18 €4.00

Open ticket €16.00

Free entry for children up to 6 years old

FIRST WEDNESDAY OF THE MONTH Free entry for visitors under 30 (from 2:00 PM until closing time)

EXTRAORDINARY OPENINGS

Monday, April 24, Tuesday, April 25, and Monday, May 1, from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM

ACCESSIBILITY

The Palazzo delle Esposizioni is accessible to people with reduced mobility or sensory disabilities through three entrances without architectural barriers.