LipanjePuntin artecontemporanea – Roma is proud to present Serafhaus, a solo show by Luigi Serafini (Rome 1949), curated by Umberto Zampini.

Serafhaus is Serafini’s flying atelier. It is a conceptual place, in temporary transit across via di Montoro, the Gulf of Trieste and the artist’s residences. A place full of worlds and fantastic creatures conceived, or maybe just discovered, throughout the years in his never-ending artistic research. The Codex Serafinianus, the more recent illustrations of Jules Renard’s novel Histoires naturelles and the paintings, installations, drawings, readymade objects and photographs allow the viewers to investigate the “diary” of Serafini’s journey into art: in its pages the world we live in is examined, sifted, dismantled, reduced to a distillate. Since his early encounter with art he has developed a coherent way of looking at things and seeing, not just watching: this is what can be synthetically called art, a unique apparatus by means of which the world itself is disclosed, through the eyes of the artist.

What Serafini gives shape to is not just a parade of alien worlds and bizarre animal and vegetal species, but a real cosmogony aimed to neutralize the intrinsic threat posed by Nature through its glorification. Within Serafini’s work Nature, a sad and cruel place, den of death and oppression, gains a literary and fairy-tale quality as in the medieval miniated manuscripts, hence it becomes melancholic, even sensual, superhuman or simply supernatural.

After the BA in Architecture at the Politecnico in Milan, Luigi Serafini started working as a designer cooperating with the Gruppo Memphis, headed by architect Ettore Sottsass. He also worked for the Italian television and for several movie productions, among which Federico Fellini’s La Voce della Luna, and stage, light and costume designing for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Among his most significant works the renowned Codex Seraphinianus, published in 1981 by Franco Maria Ricci and reprinted by Rizzoli in 2006, and Pulcinellopedia (1983), published by Longanesi should be mentioned. He also published collections of short stories for Bompiani, Archinto, Fandango and several magazines. In 2007 Pac has paid homage to Luigi Serafini’s artistic universe showing the 100 original plates of the Codex.

Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino, Federico Fellini, Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio Manganelli, Giorgio Soavi, Federico Zeri, Achille Bonito Oliva, Douglas Hofstadter, Philippe Decoufflé and Vittorio Sgarbi have taken an interest in Serafini’s works. Calvino has epitomized the mechanisms and the rhetorical devices in his oeuvre: “…like in Ovidio’s Metamorphoses, Serafini believes in the contiguity and permeability of every territory of the existing: the anatomic and the mechanic elements exchange their morphologies, the human and the vegetal reigns find their mutual completeness… the wild and the metropolitan, the writing and the living.”

LipanjePuntin artecontemporanea
via di Montoro 10 – 00186 Roma
Tel. + 39 06 68307780

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 2.00pm - 8.00pm or by appointment