Quadrature

Quadrature is the new solo exhibition by ROBOCOOP, an artistic research and urban experimentation project, which through – but not limited
to – the expressive medium of the poster, has decorated the empty spaces and forgotten walls of our cities, with suggestive and convincing architectural artworks since 2012.

Thanks to its unequivocal identity that blends architectural styles and paintings from different eras. the RomaBolognaCooperazione – as it is known by its full name – has been involved in artist residencies, urban art festivals, architecture exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

For this occasion, the duo of street artists of Roman and Bolognese origins, engage in the creation of a site-specific piece that radically changes the formal identity of Divario. The environment is invaded and divided by a temporary installation on a 1: 1 scale that prefigures a new spatial configuration through a double-height scenographic backdrop.

A fake architecture of Baroque inspiration, in Pompeian red, opens onto an imaginary landscape of Prati and the Vatican City, giving life to a completely illusory, but plausible and effective depth.

Through the reproduction of an image digitally modelled by the artists and printed on a tarp, the installation authentically evokes various architectural and pictorial references from the past such as the Sala dei Palafrenieri (1619-1621) of Palazzo Lancellotti in Rome or the sumptuous rooms of the Villa di Poppea in Oplontis (1st century BC).

The name and the theme of the exhibition itself are inspired by Quadraturis – a pictorial genre born in the second half of the 16th century, which consisted of the creation of quadratures – architectures painted on walls and ceilings within a rigorous perspective and illusionistic framework.

In 1920, in the <<Valori Plastici>> magazine (a monthly art critique publication created to spread the ideas of metaphysical painting), Giorgio De Chirico wrote: “The landscape, enclosed in the arch of a portico, as square or rectangle of the window, acquires greater metaphysical value, because it solidifies and is isolated from the space that surrounds it. Architecture completes nature”.

Thus, the exploration of the panorama continues with the works exhibited in the last room; extracts, excerpts, suggestions and coloured windows in which ROBOCOOP shifts the view and perspective to deepen the relationship between the architectural framing element and the bordering landscape, just like it happens in the installation created for the gallery space.