The Memmo Foundation presents from 12 December 2022 to 26 March 2023 Notte Oscura , the eighth edition of Conversation Piece , the annual cycle of exhibitions curated by Marcello Smarrelli dedicated to Italian and foreign artists temporarily present in Rome, or who entertain a special relationship with the city.

The protagonists this year are Pauline Curnier Jardin (scholarship holder at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici in 2020), Victor Man and Miltos Manetas (artists who have chosen Rome as one of their reference cities for years).

The succession of the various editions creates a story by chapters that deals with ever-changing topics, linked to the critical debate on the contemporary, touching on aspects concerning the history of art, but also issues of strictly topical interest on which the artists are invited to discuss through an exchange open between them and with the curator.

Dark Night , the title of this edition, is taken from the writings of John of the Cross (1542-1591), saint, mystic and doctor of the Church, considered one of the most important Spanish poets. The poem Dark night of the soul , written almost at the end of his life during a period of imprisonment, tells the personal experience of his nocturnal ecstasies, in which darkness becomes the metaphor of the adversities and obstacles encountered in detaching from the bonds with the sensible world to reach the light.

The night, as a metaphor, is also perfectly suited to Rome and its thousand-year history. City of light and splendour, which reverberates from the majestic beauty of its monuments, from the architectures and works kept within them, Rome is also a city of catacombs, cryptoporticos and ruins, which refer to a dark and secret image, an ambivalence rendered plastic from the contraposition, entirely Baroque, between the painting flooded with light of the Carracci and that imbued with darkness of Caravaggio.

The alternation between light and shadow is often used to describe the opposition between good and evil, between true and false, knowledge and ignorance; yet, darkness and obscurity, as John of the Cross teaches, can be considered moments of waiting and settling of thought, of seductive and complex ambiguities, a crucial phase in the path towards knowledge and revelation.