Chess, like love and music,
have the power to make humankind happy.
(Siegbert Tarrasch, deutsche chess player)

Eight, from the Latin word octo, is one of the oldest symbols. It is considered a sacred number, and represents the numberless quantity, the emblem of the infinite. Energy, spirituality, balance - eight are the natural forces.
As it is in chess, eight are the pawns that Italo Bergantini and Gaia Conti drop on the chessboard of Romberg Contemporary Art.
The game revolves around the number of a symbolical mythology where chess represent a playful extension of the time that is realized in an excursus of works from the 70s to nowadays. The contact with abstract materiality is regained throughout the works of both historical personalities linked to the gallery and new proposals.
Check mate is a game played among the volumes, the tracks, the signs and the supports of works, two per artist, which show the stylistic signature of each through heterogeneous colors, shapes, textures, techniques and materials.
The exhibition reveals Giorgio Galli’s controlled layers synthesized in his gestural movement, the slashes of color by Franco Marrocco that can transform the action into a sign, paper’s vibrations evoked by Vincenzo Pennacchi, the bidimensional poems of Giuseppe Graneris that intimately communicate between aesthetic and content.
And yet Toru Hamada with his formal elegance and sophisticated chromatic chords, Gino Baffo and his mastery in making the content the support, Luigi Menichelli’s delicate touch in color’s dynamically delivery of the narrative processes, and finally the sharp chromatic variations and vital tension of the gesture of Claudio Marini.
Each of them makes visible his own inner idea by pushing it out in a form of great emotional impact and by conveying specific feelings in a perfect balance.
Play is an art, and art is a role play. Players and pawns. An endless dialectic in a world hanging among the unlimited extension of reality, full of visionary ideas. Challenge is unimportant, the conscious and the unconscious arise, the lights lower and “[..]Once the players have finally left, Once time has devoured them - Jorge Luis Borges in verse in the poem Ajedrez (Chess) - Surely the ritual will not have ended [..]” on the checkered table of our infinity.

opening : Saturday 9th april 2016 at 19

mpefm ITALY art press release