SOFIA SILVA | LAPIDARIO: with a text by Giorgio Di Domenico

Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce Lapidario, Sofia Silva's first solo exhibition at the Project Room in Rome. In Sofia Silva's painting the research for ecstatic moments is combined with a predilection for elementary forms and simple patterns: the process of painting presents rather than representing, thus undermining a narrative attitude in favor of a conscious attention to form. The series of canvases, panels and plates on show investigates different aspects of walls and stone, translating the melancholic concept of 'ruin' into the more puerile meaning of ‘ruined'. The title of the exhibition, Lapidario, evokes the idea of a collection of epigraphs, inscriptions, fragments of statuary, stelae, tombstones, exalting their fragmentary nature in a tribute to forgetfulness and the limits of language. Along the cloisters, pronaos and courtyards visited by Sofia Silva, shreds of language - sign or figurative - engraved on stone follow one another in an arrangement written by time. Consequently, the inscription, understood as art intended to perpetuate memory, is here employed in its most fragile and superficial aspects. In the painting Bad Boy's Madonna, for example, the artist's self-portrait, detailed in the face but reduced to a blotch in the rest of the body, is a flat figure that, as if hit in a game of clay pigeon shooting, is suspended in the centre of a geometrically designed composition, slender in space but frivolous and criss- crossed with decorative motifs.