Xu Longsen: On Top of Two Empires, opened at the Museum of Roman Civilization in Rome on the summer solstice this year. The magnificent, imperial grandeur of the nexus of the entire Roman Empire formed an unlikely backdrop for an awe-inspiring body of work from one of China’s leading landscape painters. Dialogue was a stated intention of the exhibition for Xu Longsen’s work, juxtaposing the delicate but vast works on paper, massive scrolls, against the authoritative power of Roman sculpture and the monumentality of Roman architecture.
The diversified series of Pescecappa, the kitchen hood designed by Gaetano Pesce, was presented at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition to the designer and architect Gaetano Pesce, among the protagonists also Renza Fornaroli and Angelo Capasso, curators of the Farnesina Design Collection and Francesco Maria Greco, General Manager for cultural promotion and cooperation.
… It is precisely technology, in fact, and its now generalized use in artistic making, that brings the dialogue between art and everyday life to a crucial point, which requires reflection. And it is on this reflection that the exhibition is born. Interni Moderni is a project conceived by the art critic Angelo Capasso and created by three artists, who each worked according to their own interpretation of modernism, but also of interior design, and of art in general. Thorsten Kirchhoff, H.H. Lim and Luca Pancrazzi have undertaken to transform an exhibition space into a home, bearing in mind that that space actually “illegally” occupies an apartment, a place designed to host a private house.
Within Europalia 2003, the cultural event – linked to the semester of the Italian Presidency of the European Community, the exhibition “Places of affection landscapepassage”, curated by Angelo Capasso, and organized by the Europalia Foundation together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, within the semester of the Italian Presidency of the European Community – will take place in Belgium. The show will be hosted inside the prestigious exhibiting spaces of the Hôtel de Ville of Brussels, right on the Grand Place and at Ikob – Internationales Kunstzentrum Ostbelgien of Eupen (the main German-speaking town in Belgium). The show was born from a text by Angelo Capasso inserted in his last book “AA Art for art”(“AA L’arte per l’arte”, Rome, 2002) which goes back to Gertrude Stein’s words: “Artists have two mother-countries, a true mother-country, and an imaginary one, the one where their art takes place”. The exhibition offers a sight of the journeys and the moving of the contemporary art protagonists in the last thirty years.