Mostra collettiva HOMO FABER: the forge of the god Vulcan

Air-raid Shelter – EUR Rome office building

from 19 to 26 June 2008

The assumption is that man, like the god Vulcan from the bowels of the Earth, in every creative act of him is in solitude and in a desolate place. In the collective, literary and artistic imagination, creative inspiration takes place in a place like the exhibition one, which would be transformed into a modern forge of Vulcan.

The theme of the exhibition is dedicated to the main element of any artistic event: inspiration.

The investigation conducted by the authors starts from the place, above all mental, where inspiration finds its origin and from the relationship that this place has with the man-artist. Assuming that the creative genius is the purest and most characteristic part of the human being, that is the intellectual gift that generates the sense of the sublime, the parable on the basis of which intuition is concretized in inspiration inevitably passes through that particular place of the soul where human consciousness experiences cosmic infinity.
To get to the positive artistic object, inspiration needs to materialize through the hands of man. This further creative step takes place in a precise physical place, the tangible mirror of that spiritual dimension in which inspiration has found substance.
The man-artist, therefore, is on the one hand the medium through which the intuition of a universal idea is revealed, on the other the faber who manually concretizes this idea.
The relationship between the artist and this double place, spiritual and tangible, can only be private, intimate and subjective. Following this interpretation, the artist becomes the heir of the ancient myth of Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods who works in solitude in the bowels of the Earth. Crippled, but gifted with incredible manual skills, Vulcan is the most human of the gods precisely because he is imperfect and devoted to the toil of craftsmanship. Like any artist, the god of manual arts bases his skills on the tension between inspiration and practical work, a tension meditated above all in the place of the soul.

The suggestion of the interior space is perfectly suited to the place where the exhibition was set up: the cramped rooms of the Eur air-raid shelter, decontextualized from their original function, have been reinterpreted as the intimate ravine where each artist finds his inspiration and translates into images.

The exhibition rooms, therefore, have been transformed into a modern forge of Vulcan where the authors on display tell of the intimate relationship with their place of inspiration.

At the exhibition (already sponsored by EUR S.p.A. and the Rome XII Municipality) they exhibit:

Giampiero Abate
Emanuele Tubertosi
Serena Sorrenti
Silvia Belviso
Massimo Fogliazza
Antonio Fucito
Fabio Abbati
Agostino Dimitri
Arturo Corinto