Rome's Gaggenau celebrates braille bicentennial with constellations by Fulvio Morella

On the occasion of National Braille Day, Fulvio Morella’s solo exhibition entitled Romanitas opens in Gaggenau’s Rome space. Curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, the exhibition is open to the public from Feb. 21 to July 31, 2023, and is the second stage of the Blind Wood art project promoted by Cramum to celebrate Braille in its bicentennial year. The exhibition features the artist’s new tactile works. Alongside the wooden works for which Morella is known, textile works will be on display.

For several years now, Fulvio Morella has been combining wood with braille. What results are multisensory works with which the artist demonstrates the partiality of perception of reality. His works at first glance, in all senses, look like abstract works; in reality they are reproductions of famous places (mostly historical or archaeological sites) taken from unusual angles, so that they are not recognizable at superficial observation. The works are complemented by braille inscriptions, which also have a strong aesthetic function, explaining and showing the deeper meaning of the works. The artist thus always envisions that his works must be touched in order to be “understood.”

In the exhibition at Gaggenau DesignElementi in Rome, Morella expands his research to reflect on the future and the very role of the limits of and in human history. Blindness and braille are therefore only the starting point. Limits, like everything in human existence, are not perpetual, but momentary “stages.” Everything repeats itself and our freedom consists, according to Fulvio Morella, precisely in understanding “such eternal return.” The artist mentions the German philosopher Nietzsche in numerous works and chooses an hourglass as the symbolic image of the exhibition. On the large work Curtain of Stars, made on a fabric donated by Lelievre Paris, the artist embroiders Nietzsche’s maxim in a very particular way: “The eternal hourglass of existence is always being turned upside down again, and you with it, speck of dust!” However, the observer is not confronted with a writing, but with a collection of stars that go to form an hourglass. Each star has replaced a dot at the base of the braille alphabet, so that the phrase almost goes to form a constellation. “The artist,” as curator Frassà explains, “inspired by futurism has completed the transformation of braille into an iconic and aesthetic element. Fulvio Morella thus leads us to discover in a starry sky hidden and seductive messages in braille.”

The exhibition is built around this work, which subdivides the space, guiding the visit. We are all spurred to overcome this curtain-obstacle, to come out of the darkness to see the stars and become conscious creators of our existence. Far from any nihilistic drift, Curtain of Stars thus turns out to be an almost programmatic work, which, through the involvement of all the senses, initiates in the viewer a process of re-consciousness of self and of the inevitable eternal return that we experience every moment. Past the Curtain, the exhibition winds and completes through textile works and wooden sculpture paintings, inspired by the world of ancient theater: on the one hand, archaeology, much loved by the artist, marks the similarities between present and past; on the other hand, the Buccus mask with its wide eyeless smile evokes Pirandello and the complexity of knowing oneself and the world.

Fulvio Morella succeeds in juxtaposing a rigorous synthesis process in these works without sacrificing compositional harmony. Almost kaleidoscopic in understanding, the ensemble of his works results in an articulate exhibition path full of suggestions about who we are and where we are really going. The important thing is to “touch everything,” never stopping at misleading first impressions.

Hours: Monday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 7 p.m.

Visits open to the public by appointment only by e-mail or phone contact.

E-mail: gaggenau.roma@designelementi.it

T. +39 06 39743229, +39 371 1733120

Images: Romanitas by Fulvio Morella, Performance and exhibition view. Photo by Francesca Piovesan. Courtesy Fulvio Morella, Gaggenau, Lelièvre Paris

Rome's Gaggenau celebrates braille bicentennial with constellations by Fulvio Morella

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