Testa salpa

Marco Emmanuele
From November 29th 2024
To February 15th 2025
Operativa Arte Contemporanea
Via del Consolato, 10 – 00186, Roma www.operativa-arte.com info@operativa-arte.com

“TESTA SALPA” is the second solo show of Marco Emmanuele in the gallery space. The exhibition reveal the latest production of the artist and his deep fascination with the italian avantgarde poets of the 20th century. A selection of different works create an absurd dialogue beetween poetry, sculptures and drawings, able to remark on the incredible experimentation of the artist.

The exhibition is part of the 10th anniversary of Operativa Arte Contemporanea and marks the celebration of this happy milestone.

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In recent years, with his smartphone camera, Marco Emmanuele has collected hundreds of poems about the sea, suggested by a multitude of images that have stimulated him to draw.
For the exhibition he has selected seven poets who have had a special relationship with Rome, whose facial profiles, modeled in blown glass, become boyles that float in the gallery with some drawings inside them. Messages entrusted to a meta-sea, whose currents allow even people with different sensibilities to approach the dialogue, a deep and dark ocean in which sculpture and drawing can coexist without disciplinary discrimination (as abstraction and figuration).

A series of watercolors on the walls restores the attitude with which the artist has recently investigated the landscape, through the most dreamlike views that one can search for.
These are celestial maps, in which the stars are made with a material dear to him, glass brought to the point of melting. The background colors are the most common ones of the sky and at the same time those that are always new at every casual glance a^er hours of stillness (for example at the seaside you can stand still for hours, in other places instead standing still is tiring).
Among the stars, a series of possible trajectories for traveling were randomly traced by some snails that entered the work surface, on a spring evening.
The title of the exhibition alludes, in addition to the figure of a head that sets off and goes out to sea, to the Salpa fish, whose head was ingested by the Romans to reach hallucinatory states during celebrations.

As the artist reminds us:
How many trips we could make if only the head always set sail! You don’t have to go far.
It would be enough to stay even three hours from home.