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Mimmo Jodice “Anima Urbis”
Venue: Via della Mercede 12/a, 00187 Rome, entrance main stair, 3rd floor.
Duration: from 17 February till 30 of April 2006
Curated by: Marco Bulli
Mimmo Jodice, an Italian artist internationally known, hasn’t been on exhibition in Rome since the year 2000.
The title of his last exhibition in Rome was Anamnesi, held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, where he presented about twenty images of classic statues.
Now the artist, at the Galleria dell’Oca, presents an exhibition whose title is Anima Urbis in which he continues his exploration of the Ancient World. As in many other exhibitions at the Galleria dell’Oca this one too presents artworks realized for this occasion apart from others already known.
The novelty is that Jodice for the very first time has agreed to photograph the city of Rome, something which has never happened before.
From 1986 Jodice has focused his work on classical antiquity. The artist has photographed all the places that contain traces of the ancient world: from Greece to the South of France, from Spain, to the Northern African Coast, from Libya to Turkey, to Lebanon, from Jordan, to Syria; he has never wanted to propose Rome as the centre of that specific model of civilization.
Therefore for the first time here are the photographs of Rome by Mimmo Jodice.
On exhibition, thirty photographs: the first, at the entrance of the Gallery, is very well known. The Tomb of the Roman Soldier, Petra, Jordan, 1993. The image, of large format, pictures a door, or a very large black hole. It’s the beginning of a path, because each experience forces everyone to cross the threshold, although this particular one, because of its terrifying aspect, obliges us to take on the risk of passing it: the risk of putting into brackets the reassuring landscape of our everyday life, the risk of going through unknown places, where the faces are unknown and disquieting.
The images of Jodice’s archaeology are unlike human figures and alien from signs of our present, are places of Memory. These images are visions of the inner part where the technique of the wavy image evokes the restless spirit of that place. However these are not fossils of suspended time but are presences of the moving spirit of history, which cannot find any peace.
These photographs are not describing what we see in a minutely-finished stile, what the tourist can easily recognize, but are more soul visions. Mimmo Jodice writes: “…at the end all we meet is a landscape of the interior. This phenomenon is a metaphor which describes my relationship with photography and the world: it happens that the lens of my camera ought to look outside, to observe the real world, and instead it finishes by “looking inwards” and projecting what we see in a timeless dimension”.
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