La Rocca Project Space

The exhibition includes among its venues a space worth rediscovering.
The place you’re now in was originally a storage facility for the local seafarers’ cooperative. Today, it reopens its doors as the new Project Space of Fondazione La Rocca.This section of the exhibition presents a wunderkammer—a chamber of wonders. But the wonders collected here don’t come from the world at large; they come from the world of painting.The space houses an immersive installation that the artist describes as a “staging of painting.”
It brings together what he calls “works that sometimes pretend not to be”, such as canvases and sculptures, works in a certain way within the work, along with archival materials: videos, images, studio instruments and elements associated with painting.Where usually the viewer is presented with the outcome of the artistic process - the finished painting – here, the spectator is invited to enter the very universe of the practice of painting.

Simone Ciglia: Here we developed what you might call an experimental installation, which builds on a work you created at Monitor gallery in Pereto in 2023. It was a kind of archive or Wunderkammer—a space that displayed not only artworks in the traditional sense, but also non-artworks. I mean things that are connected to art, that orbit around it, but aren’t strictly considered artworks themselves. I think the key question here is about presenting the visitor with something that’s adjacent to painting—or art in general—but isn’t art itself.

Matteo Fato: Yes. It’s kinda hard to explain. What comes to my mind is a comparison: I love solo piano concerts, you know? When you hear a pianist playing alone. But often, to really understand a solo, you need to have heard the full concert. So, if you like, this could be seen as a kind of concert of all the instruments that, for me, are essential to painting. It’s a concert that I hope will help people not to leave the exhibition. What I wanted was to open up a possibility in the city—not so much to enter an exhibition, but to step out of one, and yet, never fully leave it behind. To stay in an exhibition that’s happening in the city itself—because the city is also a museum.