At Palazzo Merulana, the exhibition  Echoes of Time, a solo show by the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaotao, curated by Andrea Romoli Barberini.
 

The exhibition presents deep reflections through images created by Zhang Xiaotao using digital animation and painting techniques on the concepts of time, space, nature, spirituality, and the human condition in contemporary society, also including references to traumas, fears, and collective neuroses.

The Echoes of Time are therefore to be interpreted as the resonating in the artist's mind of experiences lived at different moments and places, even distant, in their own life, which through the images take on universal meanings.

The particular interpretation of the narrative recovery by Zhang Xiaotao is based on a memory in which facts, situations, and places from their own past resonate and resurface in their works in still or moving images, as echoes of time, due to their emblematic nature. Therefore, the works are based on a kind of memory, events, and moments, deconstructed and fragmented, which, when translated into images with strong symbolic value, can also drastically break the bond of verisimilitude with the experience itself, to assume, through allegory, very different forms. In this metamorphic transition of their visual metaphors, the artist always maintains clear formal readability and the relative narrative dimension belonging to the visual text, as if it were a necessary prerequisite for formulating possible connections of meaning between the different works.