Oreste Casalini, 20 years of art on display at the Portuguese Institute of St. Anthony in Rome

The last two decades of the work of Oreste Casalini (Naples, 1962), an acclaimed contemporary artist, goes on display at thePortuguese Institute of St. Anthony in Rome, where the exhibition Oreste Casalini. A Multitude. Works from 1998 to 2018, curated by Paola Pallotta. The works on display, made from 1998 to the present, represent a heterogeneous selection in terms of technique, size and chronological affiliation, but they are united by their ability to reveal the artist’spictorial energy: eclectic and articulated works that, the presentation reads, “define a complex exhibition itinerary that does not intend to present itself as a retrospective, but as the highlighting of some aspects of Oreste Casalini’s artistic practice and poetics.”

These are mostly paintings (when instead Casalini is often engaged in site-specific installations and works that assimilate different techniques), which make it clear how the link with painting is a constant in Casalini’s production. “And on the constant bond that has held ideas and works together, on the never-abandoned theme of painting,” the presentation continues, “this exhibition focuses. An overview that is a kind of self-portrait, an image of the system of representation of the relations between art and life, the central object of all his work.” In Rome the public will also find sculptures, plaster casts and ceramics that together with the paintings “trace a multiple but not broken line, rather strongly modulated on the robust core of the necessity of artistic practice as an exercise of the mind, authentically understood, lived, experienced. And constant reflection has always had, as a privileged key to access the original chaos of form, drawing, a propaedeutic method experimented on notebook sheets and papers of various sizes, collected in different places and worked on the go as in a portable studio. A persevering practice, an essay, a verification.”

The exhibition is thus a kind of summa of Oreste Casalini’s work and style, capable of looking at the historical Italian tradition but also of being able to keep away from conventions, fashions and definitions. The exhibition, which enjoys the patronage of the Ambassador of Portugal to the Holy See, Antonio Almeida Lima, opens Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Admission is free.

Pictured: Oreste Casalini, Province (2002).

Oreste Casalini, 20 years of art on display at the Portuguese Institute of St. Anthony in Rome

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