Raffaele Rossi
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry
ArtNexus, #123 (December 2024-May 2025)

Italian artist Raffaele Rossi’s recent exhibition Viaje a los orígenes [Journey to the Origins], curated by Antonello Tolve, was presented on the ground floor of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry. The careful selection allowed us to capture the essence of his work while enjoying its breadth and depth.

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In the first room, works such as Viaggio nel tempo [Journey in Time], La mia laguna [My Lagoon], and Orizzonte mágico [Magic Horizon] emphasize the passage of time, the time horizon, the racconto, maelstrom, and repetition. In inexplicable ways, this artist manages to capture and match speed and stillness. The subtle figurative strokes blur as if erased by the passage of time. Time seems condensed and infinite, as if the different temporalities were superimposed on each other in the same image, which can contain everything and nothing at once.

 

Likewise, in Viaggio nel tempo [Time Travel] and Codice Sconosciuto [Unknown Code], a series of symbols could refer to ancient alchemy or to an unknown language in a weightless and ethereal space that exists only within the pictorial surface where the inscribed elements are arranged.

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Repetition is a resource Rossi employs to erase and deepen; it is not tautological but rather contributes to generate associations and new meanings. The lagoon, the soul, the epistle, or the stele are themes that he continues to work on to produce diverse facets. He is incessantly exploring the passing of time around these same themes, which function more as ideas than as motifs. But at the same time, each reiteration within the same piece—as in the series “Viaggio nel tempo or Codice sconosciuto”—depersonalizes or transfigures the form to the point where each component loses its singularity and, in this very game, turns our attention back to it.

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His paintings unfailingly reveal not the thing itself but its intuition. A sensation, a longing, or a remembrance of landscape predominates, manifesting itself in subtle contours, profiles, and lines that fade into the pictorial space. Figures always occupy a second or third place; they’re never in the foreground but slip away and require attentive and unhurried observation. In Rossi, we cannot find forms but suggestions that vanish in an endless number of vaporous scenes full of sunsets and warm horizon-like glazes.

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Depending on the support—at times elongated, circular, vertical, and even concave and convex, or in the form of boxes, niches, and shrines—horizontality, verticality, and sometimes circularity prevail in his brushstrokes. There is a strong sense of unity and succinctness in each piece. Rossi manages to condense perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. There is no preconceived result since what guides his creative process is the very decanting of instinctive gestures on matter.

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On the other hand, in “Paesaggio dell’anima mia” [Landscape of My Soul], his series on the soul, we can observe an assertive use of color; one dominated by emotions, as by alchemy and esoterism. These works offer complex depths and hollows, usually with a central composition, in a possible search for the existential. We perceive a return to the origin, to what is primitive and essential.

 

Rossi has spent years researching the materials and pictorial tradition of fresco, especially that of the Venetian school. This knowledge is materialized in the preparation of his wooden and canvas supports, which are covered by layers of sand, plaster, lime, marble dust, and other aggregates. As for paint and pigments, the artist has taken up the technique of egg tempera with yolks, oils, and rabbitbrush, as was customary since antiquity.

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He also uses metals such as copper, silver, or lead in many of his pieces, sometimes as inlays in bas-reliefs or as finishes applied to wood panels. These metallic elements lead us back to alchemy and the transmutation of materials and their oxidation, as well as to the transformation of emotions conceived in his works as atmospheres.

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Similarly, the presence of water in some colors [green and blue] and themes [boats, ships, and lagoons] reminds us of the importance of this element from an alchemical perspective. At times, such bodies of water can almost seamlessly become skies. Likewise, the journey is a frequent motif in much of his work: a spiritual, sensitive, and metaphorical journey.

 

We left the exhibition with a warm, serene, meditative sensation that summoned us to reflect on our own existence and the vicissitudes of the soul.