TERAMO – Next Saturday, May 18, at 5.30 pm at the municipal exhibition hall in Via Nicola Palma in Teramo, the exhibition “GIANCARLO SCIANNELLA works from 1962 to 1992 and the experience of visual arts in the theater with ROMANO ROCCHI” will be inaugurated. The exhibition is curated by Simone Battiatoregarding the sculptor Sciannella and Giulia D’Ignazioregarding the mime Rocchi.
The castellan Giancarlo Sciannella and the Teramo area Romano Rocchi they had met in the 1960s in the classrooms of the Castelli Art Institute and together they had participated in a collective exhibition in 1964 at the San Giorgio gallery in Teramo. Also in 1967, in the same gallery, other works by the two artists were exhibited. Eight years after Sciannella’s death and six years after Rocchi’s death, their art returns home, returns to Teramo, fifty-seven years after their last exhibition together.
The exhibition will remain on display until June 8th, with the following times: from 10:00 to 13:00 and from 15:00 to 20:00.
Below we report the introductory note from the curators, Giulia D’Ignazio and Simone Battiato.
Giancarlo Sciannella: works from 1962 to 1992 and the experience of visual arts in the theater with Romano Rocchi
The aim and objective of the exhibition is to introduce to the public part of the work of two leading figures of the artistic avant-garde and of the national theatrical post-avant-garde, the sculptor Giancarlo Sciannella and the mime Romano Rocchi, both sons of a territory with which they drew upon for the development of their sign imagery and their poetics (as evidenced by the two early works Vaso con Torri, Civetta, Sole e Luna by Sciannella and Bowl with abstract decorations by Rocchi, created during their years as a student at the Institute of ‘Art of Castelli); in particular, a section of the exhibition investigates the collaborative relationship born between the two artists in the 1980s, on the occasion of some theater reviews organized by Rocchi.
Giancarlo Sciannella (Castelli 1943 – Rome 2016) trained in the 1960s, first at the Castelli Art Institute under the guidance of Serafino Mattucci and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he attended the painting course directed by Franco Gentilini . He made his debut as a painter, then dedicating himself to ceramic and subsequently clay sculpture, a material which would later become his main means of expression; by sector critics it is considered among the greatest expressions of contemporary Italian earth sculpture, which in Italy, in the twentieth century, boasts illustrious precursors such as Martini, Fontana, Leoncillo, and recent expressions such as Valentini, Spagnulo, Mainolfi.
The Teramo exhibition presents three decades of production (1962-1992) starting from his debut in the first half of the 1960s as a ceramist, at the art institute of his hometown, Castelli, then recently renewed in its management and didactically oriented to the reception of the new grammar of the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century; two works present in the exhibition, Structure I and Structure II, both from 1966, highlight the precursors of an individual research based on the initial reading and re-elaboration of the artistic trend of the Informal in its different declinations (sign, gesture, matter), which will continue also in the decade of the Seventies (Who will give us water for death?, 1975; Impressions, 1976) with works that demonstrate a particular existential vis linked to individual experience through the use of “poor” materials marked by primitive signs and childish writing. These are the years of Sciannella’s participation in various editions of the Faenza Prize and institutional awards.
The section relating to the decade of the Eighties highlights the sculptor’s “debt” towards the “material and existential” lesson of Alberto Burri, seen for the first time in L’Aquila in 1962 at the city’s sixteenth-century fort on the occasion of the Homage to Umbrian artist proposed by the Roman critic Enrico Crispolti within the Rassegna Alternative Attuali curated by him and in which Sciannella participated in the 1987 edition. In Sciannella’s sculpture Burrian materials appear such as tar (Spirale, 1988), iron (Sudario, 1990), wood, an element often subject to combustion (Africa, 1987). In these works, as in Burri’s works, there is the agonic conflict between the disintegrating force of matter and the search for a desired plastic-formal balance (Tempio, 1989; A ferro e a calcio, 1989; Teca, 1990); matter which now in Sciannella is far from virtuosic and narrative temptations, but rather allusive.
The exhibition also documents the artistic collaboration born in the 1980s between Sciannella and the Teramo mime Romano Rocchi (Teramo, 1942 – Rome, 2018), aka Ro’Rocchi, known in the classrooms of the Castelli Art Institute in the 1960s ; both had participated in a collective exhibition in 1964 at the Galleria San Giorgio in Teramo; the same gallery had shown some of their works again in 1967, proposing a sort of vis à vis.
Rocchi’s poetics, which reflects on the concept of “total art”, aims at the synaesthetic fusion of different artistic expressions (painting, sculpture, dance, music and poetry) ideally achieving, through movement and bodily gestures, the “connection” of the different languages. In this regard, in 1984, on the occasion of the theater show Suicide Rosa at the theatrical experimentation “cellar” Il Cielo in Rome, the mime’s desire to “theatricalize” the visual arts in the theater was manifested; the same, physically interacts with Sciannella’s works, the Meteorites (exhibited in the exhibition section) thus transforming itself into an “artistic body”. The collaboration between the two artists continued in 1985 for the show Incontro con Paul Klee, at the Sala Borromini in Rome; in 1988 on the occasion of the Mimus show at the La MaMa theater in New York and the following year for the Mimus Centuntulus show at the Colosseo Theater also in Rome. The Teramo exhibition documents this interesting artistic partnership through the works of Sciannella used by Rocchi in his performances (Meteoriti, 1984 and Dardo, 1988), the original posters of the shows and the stage photos; it also acts as a focus of investigation and in-depth analysis on the figure of Romano Rocchi, one of the most original artists on the national post-avant-garde theater scene.
