From 21 March to 25 August 2024
Luigi Serafini (Rome, 1949) is an artist, architect, author and designer, whose research has always developed outside the more conventional contexts of art.
An ontological house is conceived as an expanded work, an environment in which Serafini has created a meta-portrait that transports his imaginative attitude into the museum through the reworking of the interiors of his Roman house. Created as an enormous three-dimensional Codex Seraphinianus , and suspended between a dreamlike scenography with an indecipherable language and a work of geometric and cataloging architecture, the artist's house is a testimony of almost 40 years of life and work which today risks disappearing due to a condition of eviction which is raising public awareness.
The Codex is Serafini's best-known editorial work, containing over a thousand drawings made between 1976 and 1978 and published in 1981 by Franco Maria Ricci Editore: a visual encyclopedia where each object or image reproduces or fantasizes zoological, mechanical, botanical, mineralogical, technological and alien in constant metamorphosis.
The exhibition hosts a selection of Serafini's eclectic production which ranges from sculpture to the design of everyday objects, from hand drawing to photography, from publications to the invention of languages. The two side walls of the room show the photographs of the house taken by artist and laid out within a painted geometry that recalls the decorative motifs of the house, while a floor plan helps to locate the individual volumes and imagine the permeability between the rooms.
A chair, placed at the entrance, is the prototype of the Suspiral model produced in 1984 and, together with the Nessy teapot, with its snake-shaped handle and spout, shows how Serafini's work eschews the division between decoration categories and functionality, while a resin sculpture reproduces a fantastic animal halfway between a caterpillar and a horse. The texts on the walls are written using the asemic writing of the Codex, that is, an open semantic form that does not have its own meaning and does not transcribe any existing alphabet or imaginary.
Via Nizza, 138, Rome, Italy
Opening hours
opens - closes | last entry | |
monday | Closed now | |
tuesday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
wednesday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
thursday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
friday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
saturday | 10:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
sunday | 10:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |