Luca Vitone

Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome
Through November 5

Vitone creates portraits of the world, his own personal ‘maps’, by reproducing only the essence of the places he wants to describe, or rather, that which is left at the sensory level: smell, sight and sound. These form the basic coordinates for a rewriting of geography, as we know it, in this ‘virtual’ era.

The title of the exhibition, Stundàiu, encapsulates perfectly the typical characteristics associated with people from Genoa. Borrowing the words of Eugenio Montale, a writer from Genoa, the artist defines the Genovese as “proud, timid and diffident, but with a high sense of morality.” Taking these characteristics as his starting point, the exhibition leads us on a journey through the artist’s reminiscences and Proustian “memories of the heart”, confronting an image of the local people from Genoa with a portrait of the city itself.

Vitone fills the gallery space with those essential elements that reveal “his“ Genoa. At the entrance is a wooden structure, made from a wall and a ladder, that replicates a creuza (the typical lanes running down to the sea in Genoa). Passing through this you enter in a room full of photographs that evoke the spirit of Genoa. They depict areas of Rome which, from the sixteenth century to date, were home to Genoa’s famous sons (including Giuseppe Mazzini and Luigi Tenco).

Having crossed these spaces the visitor reaches a fountain whose blue water and salty smell takes us back to Genoa’s shores. In this room, Vitone also makes use of sound to help us in our mental voyage. A video showing a concert of trallallero singing, typical folk music from Genoa, is projected contemporaneously on two screens.

On the way out of the exhibition the visitor comes across a small, extremely rare kind of table known as a “quadrifoglio”. Resting on this is a traditional Genovese moneybox (bisciueta) shaped exactly like a red terracotta brick. The allusion this time is to another stereotypical characteristic of the Genovese people: meanness.

Vitone interweaves the traditions, customs and habits of a city with its architecture and landscape, its music and language, to offer a portrait at the heart of which lies the “collective memory”.




Angelo Capasso
Translation by Rosalind Furness