Sara Rossi
Opening: April 4th at 6.30 pm
Through April 5th to 31st of May 2025
Tuesday to Saturday from 3 pm to 7 pm
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present a solo exhibition dedicated to Sara Rossi (Milan, 1970), Italian artist, photographer, and video artist with a distinguished national and international career, titled Rêver. The exhibition features installations, photographic works, and a video in an immersive journey that intertwines dream, memory, archive, and landscape.
The title of the exhibition, Rêver (from French: to dream, desire, imagine, fantasize, think, but also reverse, reverse side, flip side, reinterpretation in other languages), introduces the main work, a site-specific installation that turns the gallery space into a vast visual panorama. The piece unfolds as a circular composition of cut-outs from photographic books, arranged along the walls of the main hall. Positioned at the centre, the visitor is enveloped by the artwork and can explore its every detail. This approach conjures the ancient panorama technique, a circular artwork designed so that the viewer, standing in the middle, can easily contemplate each element. The exhibition’s title, Rêver, is no arbitrary: it is a palindrome, readable in both directions, suggesting the circularity of space, gaz
e, and time. According to Sara Rossi, who draws strong inspiration from Bachelard, every dream is a material vision; therefore, rêver is a spectaculum in the literal sense of something openly displayed to the public eye. Within the artist’s vision, it is essential to investigate the permanent connection between the reproduction of images and their presentation.
A significant section of the show is dedicated to the photographic project ABC (2013), which is still in progress. Positioning herself in an ideal continuity with Ghirri’s Viaggio in Italia, Rossi delivers a comprehensive investigation of peripheral areas in Italian cities. Sara Rossi explores the relationship between advertising signs and the urban landscape: she isolates textual elements while simultaneously placing them in dialogue with one another, creating genuine visual poems. The contrast between irony and profundity opens new interpretations of the relationship between words, images, the urban environment, and the elements that shape our collective memory.
The exhibition includes the video Era (2002), filmed on Super-8 and later transferred into digital. The film alternates between images of ancient ruins and natural landscapes, featuring footage of the Ciane River, where wild plants grow, as a mirror in which a female figure is reflected. The video’s title plays on the multiple meanings of Era: it references the goddess, the past tense of the verb to be, and even a geological era. Shot in Super-8, reminiscent of an amateur documentary from the early 1970s, the video narrates a more imaginary than real journey, a personal allegorical interpretation of the artist’s figure, transcending the Narcissus self to become the landscape itself. The video opens with fragments of amateur films shot fifty years ago in Central America or on the island of Ceylon by the artist’s grandfather, followed by footage of the Ciane River, near Syracuse. The work reflects on time and memory. For Rossi, experimenting with film is a way to restore the richness and quality to the image.
