The exhibition “Nel solco dei tempi” (In the Wake of Time) at the Monumental Complex of the Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni in Rome features three artists: Vito Bongiorno, Angelo Colagrossi, and Mauro Magni. Contrasting with the imposing travertine facade of the late 16th-century church of San Salvatore in Lauro, access to the museum complex is through a small, unassuming doorway to its side. This fissure, a seemingly hidden point in the building’s facade, creates an amplified sense of immersion upon entry. Inside, a Renaissance cloister of warm, light-colored plaster and perfect proportions opens up to various rooms, corridors, and courtyards.
To reach the exhibition space, visitors traverse the foundations of the adjacent convent, dating back to the 12th century or earlier. This path winds through medieval layouts, repurposed Roman materials, doorways framed by successive arcades, and imposing Baroque decorative elements. It is an unexpected, surprising, and spiritual place, governed by a different rhythm—one built on the evolution of knowledge and the needs of the community it housed. It feels human-scaled, prioritizing the individual over machines and simultaneity. This vast trajectory, expanding and contracting depending on the viewpoint, spatially reflects the exhibition’s title: “Nel solco dei tempi.”
The interior of the monumental complex is a powerful force that envelops the visitor, generating immense energy. However, the real challenge unfolds within the exhibition’s dedicated gallery space, where the focus is on painting. Upon entering, one finds themselves in an interior within an interior, a process that continues deeper into the complex. Each space within the Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni is a layered, hidden realm, revealing itself unpredictably to the visitor. The surprise extends beyond the initial entrance to the very heart of the complex, its core, intended to house contemporary, living art in its depths.
This progression inverts the perspective. The work presented by Bongiorno, Colagrossi, and Magni aims to capture this energy, absorb it from the location, and release it into a shared trajectory where their three distinct styles and visions must combine, acting in unison when possible, at the same point. The artists seem to have chosen to connect their displays through compositional resonance and rhythmic proportion, evident in the dimensions of their canvases and their deliberate arrangement. This placement connects and utilizes all residual spaces, minimizing the infinite variables of the venue. They push every possible element of dialogue to prevent anything from creating too much distance between them, thus dissipating their mutual energy.
The exhibition itself is a structured, almost anthological presentation, encompassing decades of activity. It both magnifies and diminishes the present narrative, our own history, the history of our time. Yet, it is anchored by an artistic narrative of the subject’s creative specificity, spanning very recent eras. The artists’ formative paths within Italian and Roman art of the mid-20th century—mentioning the Scuola di Piazza del popolo and Forma 1, among others—reflect the post-war renaissance and modernity. It’s akin to a biography told through paintings, moving in a continuous backlight of moments that, due to their recency, now feel even more distant. The concept of compositional connection emerges, harmonized with the categories of personal styles and the complexity of the context.
The exhibition path is composed of literally polycentric spaces, unified by a recent renovation featuring dark paneling. These spaces, within a sequence of unpredictable proportions—sometimes vast, sometimes minuscule—present a risk in themselves. They actively engage and compel the visitor towards sudden, even disturbing sensations of opening and closing, intensifying an observation that is never neutral. As the path delves deeper into the temporal layers described, it unfolds as an excavation, an inverse, sometimes unsettling process. Yet, this is contained by the concept that light, if it exists, is purely internal, pertaining to consciousness and occurring in silence, at the core, deep within oneself. Illumination happens in darkness, and there is nothing more spiritual than this.
The work of Bongiorno, Colagrossi, and Magni is an exploration of the memory of their individual journeys, expressed through a painting that uses abstraction as a starting point to anchor itself and then extend towards figurative, landscape, or realist conclusions. These visions are framed within a familiar, indolent, and known horizon line. This is exemplified by the “mountain” profiles that dominate many of Mauro Magni’s scenes—a tower, a silhouette, a monumental evocation of Tatlin, perhaps a Mont Saint Michel in serigraphic style, or simply the landscape viewed from one’s own home. These are sometimes menacing dreamscapes, as in “Apocalisse c-7,” and sometimes serene, as in “Utopia” and “Memorie di Viaggio.” A consistent pattern, achieved through rapid brushwork that emphasizes the contour line, defines and isolates the form from the background. The background can be expansive, fluorescent, rich with incised writings, or feature pop-art serial typography.
Thus, a modality that initially presents itself as informal, marked, and gestural, even aiming for a subtraction of the artist’s gesture, is then revealed in Colagrossi’s drips as “rain.” This reconnects to the pure and simple reality expressed in the artwork’s title: “Guarda, Piove” (Look, it’s raining).
Colagrossi trained with Turcato and Attardi, and shared life paths and friendships with Ennio Calabria and Bruno Ceccobelli. The centrality of the pictorial process, focused on autonomy, utilizes the silhouette and modular repetition, augmented by surface scratches and drips. His work presents itself, or can be seen as, a horizontal plane on which a slow vertical fall occurs. The plane is the stage for action, where a carpet of leaves disperses in the same way as a carpet of numbers, moved by a single gust of wind. The context then becomes natural, perhaps, because it is extracted from nature and evokes it as a figure at our feet, as a flow within matter when viewed from top to bottom.
Numbers, like PCs, slide within the atmosphere depicted in Angelo Colagrossi’s paintings. These are series where his poetics are concentrated, and where the primacy of the object is no longer a commodity, a figure, or a profile, but a call to the symbolic annihilation of a person’s physical presence, reduced to their archive, their tool, the PC. These are simulacra of identities alternative to the body, removed from the physical and biological reality of the human form, its nature, its environment. Today’s difficult social organization is produced in the eternal live broadcast of one’s own life, transformed into an endless LIVE, a reversed domestic television where what circulates is not even the image of oneself, the fetishism of reality, the sign as symbolic infrastructure, but merely the metric and computational system of one’s data. And that’s all.
Bongiorno, more than the others, employs an abstract, analytical language. His history is strongly conditioned by the experience of the Belice earthquake in Sicily, with Gibellina serving as a bridge—an existential and terrestrial trauma, a rupture, a shock that annihilates the places of one’s security, roads, houses, and lives. This was followed by his family’s long geographic dispersal, the choice to drift before settling permanently in Rome.
His painting is as close as possible to an erasure, used as an exemplary device. He predominantly chooses monochrome, and the color he selects is what remains after a fire: ash. This might stem from a need to extinguish the traumatic experience through contemplation of stasis. Vito Bongiorno’s painting encourages prolonged meditation, active concentration on geometric forms profiled on the surface, often as black, shadowy shapes, residual imprints, the final impression after a fire. He uses ordinary, commercial, humble materials, common charcoal to fill parts of these imprints, shapes, and sometimes gold leaf, uniting the sought-after elegant primary abstraction of geometry with a “low” and “high” reference, attempting, in the flat and spatial clarity of things, to shorten the distance between these two poles: destruction and creation.
The exhibition is part of the “Gli Orizzonti” series and is curated by Paola Di Gianmaria. The catalog, published by Il Cigno edizioni, includes critical texts by Canova and Guglielmo Gigliotti. The entire project is supported by the supervision of Lorenzo Zichichi and the Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni.
