LUCA VITONE | Capricci e altri umori

Rolando Anselmi Gallery is pleased to present Capricci e altri umori, Luca Vitone’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring a selection of works from the Capricci series (2005–2025). Since the late 1980s, Luca Vitone’s artistic practice has investigated the layered identity of places, exploring their geographical, political, social, and poetic dimensions. His works often take the form of conceptual portraits of places, constructed with site-specific materials, dust, pigments, maps, sounds, that embody memory, tensions, and transformations. The Capricci series, initiated in 2005, continues along this trajectory, unfolding around prints, engravings, lithographs, and period postcards by various authors - from Giovanni Battista Piranesi to Alexandre Calame, Félix Benoist, Giovanni Volpato, Giuseppe Vasi, Pierre Mortier, and other anonymous artists - which Vitone transforms through the addition of musical notes drawn in ink. The exploration of the cultural and geographical stratigraphy of places thus unfolds through found images that Vitone reshapes into visual scores. The movement of the notes, emerging from ruins, cavities, stones, and architectures, evokes submerged presences and becomes a metaphor for a cultural memory rooted in the earth. In this way, the original engravings open up to a sonic and poetic dimension, inviting the viewer to “listen” to history and its stratifications. The Capriccio, a genre that since the eighteenth century has combined reality and invention, here becomes a tool to recount the persistence of memory in landscapes and the ability of music to make it alive and shared: notes rise from archaeological remnants, transforming views into sound stages. Through this investigation, Vitone traverses places and returns an imaginary of them that interweaves physical, symbolic, and socio-historical dimensions. In this sense, the Capricci are not merely graphic works, but choral devices that render perceptible an invisible heritage: an echo of forgotten stories that continues to vibrate in the present, resonating within the space of the work with buried voices and lost narratives.