The “Night Effect” exhibition at Palazzo Barberini in Rome

From baroque naturalism to contemporary American art. Palazzo Barberini lights up with the exhibition Night effect: New American realismor. Over 150 works by artists active in the United States, coming from the Aïshti Foundation of Beirut as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. “It is a project we started working on almost two years ago, we are interested in comparing two forms of realism: the Caravaggio one and the American one” explained Flaminia Gennari Santori, curator of the exhibition together with Massimiliano Gioni. “It is also a way to underline how the Palace can welcome the contemporary”. The project is the result of a collaboration with Tony and Elham Salamé, founders of Aïshti, a luxury institution dedicated to contemporary culture. “This is an international exhibition, which goes from Beirut to the USA and arrives in Rome” added the Director of the National Galleries of Ancient Art, Thomas Clement Salomon.
The title of the exhibition is taken from a work on display by Lorna Simpson, which in turn refers to the meta-cinematographic masterpiece by François Truffaut, La nuit américaine (Night effect) of 1973. In which, amidst amnesia and psychic imbalances, the “Night Effect” (or “Day for night”) filter was adopted for the first time, to make daytime scenes nocturnal. The process opens with three interventions from metropolitan taste, including that post-Blackness by the artist Glen Lygon, who painted the neon sign “black”America”, in a discussion on the racial issues also addressed in Henry Taylor’s subsequent triptychs, created for the 2019 Venice Biennale.

The “Night Effect” exhibition at Palazzo Barberini

Once past the threshold, you enter a gallery of rooms that reflect the grotesque style, dear to the Baroque. Large format canvases intertwine the themes of fantasy and carnival with autofiction, revolving around a shocking vision of the inter-generational body.
There is Urs Fischer’s alien horse in the Borromini atrium. But above all an abundance of oblique feminine silhouettes. The mutant bodies of Louise Bonnet and Judith Eisler precede Joan Semmel’s naked self-portraits, where flesh becomes a fragment-monument. In an arc that touches on the ectoplasmic women of Willem de Kooning and the translucent porn paintings of Christina Quarles, queen of queer. When the pictorial gaze is raised to the landscape, a type of hysterical realism which, between acid and bright colours, focuses on natural disasters. This is the case of Nate Lowman’s Hurricanes. While the interior landscapes of Sara Hughes and Josh Smith reveal disturbing insights into the psyche, according to a magical neorealism. The theme of information overload in the digital age, resulting in a state of existential paranoia and in the post-human, is well represented by the work of Seth Price and arrives at the paradox of a realism that is measured against abstraction.

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From Cattelan to Cindy Sherman, on display in Rome

On the main floor, Maurizio Cattelan’s pigeons, perched on the pilasters of the Bernini atrium, suggest an alienating sense of reference to Hitchcock’s “Birds”. While in the Oval Room, Charles Rey’s large fiberglass archangel is a tear in the paper sky, since it has no wings or sacral aura, being, in reality, the portrait of a surfer. Then in the Marble Room there is a curious display: 61 works, in a bulimia of images, recreate the environment of a seventeenth-century picture gallery.
The last section of the exhibition unfolds in the rococo splendor of the Eighteenth-Century Apartment, dominated by the themes of simulation and dissimulation. The photographs of Cindy Sherman, the video work of the gay artist Klara Lidén in dialogue with that of Kjartansson. And finally, the work by Lorna Simpson which gives the exhibition its title and the windows by Ryanne Tanet. Darken precisely with that blue filter that hides the light, causing a mimesis called: night effect.

Francesca de Paolis

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