“Being in Rome is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, says the young university student sitting on a step with wide eyes. She is aware that visiting Rome – even in the months in which the city is shocked by construction sites for the Jubilee 2025, the ‘great capital traffic jam’ – is an occasion that marks a lifetime. She is part of a group of students who have just arrived from the United States: they study in Miami, and will be in Italy for two weeks, a tour – she adds the girl – between Florence and Genoa, Milan and Venice which is “a privilege”. At the end of a morning in which the young people have already been to the Vatican Museums and before running to Santa Maria della Vittoria, to be enraptured by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, they make a stop at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Right here, a new exhibition space was inaugurated a few weeks ago, the Galleria Accademia Contemporanea (Gac) which overlooks the hemicycle in front, the so-called Piazza Ferro di Cavallo. The Gac will always be open to the public (the times coincide with those of the training activity), can be visited free of charge and with its own calendar of exhibitions. It is in the ‘heart’ of the Roman Trident, an almost obligatory point of passage for anyone who, from Piazza del Popolo, through Via di Ripetta, wants to get to the Ara Pacis or the Mausoleum of Augustus.
“My mission is to give the Academy a central position again, in the world of art and beyond, opening it up to the contemporary” explains Cecilia Casorati, the director of the Academy. This is why the presence of young American students is not accidental: because the Gac is one of those points that, in Rome, wants to act as a bridge between ancient and modern. The inaugural exhibition curated by Casorati is dedicated to Jannis Kounellis, created in collaboration with Archivio Kounellis and Jannis Kounellis Estate: it presents five enormous easels by the Greek but Roman-adopted artist, a central figure of the Arte Povera movement. Born in 1936 in Greece, Kounellis, who had grown up in a country at war (first due to the Second World War, then due to the civil conflict), at the age of twenty, rejected by the Academy of Art in Athens, decided to move to Rome, enrolling in the Academy’s courses. He remained there for four years, at the school of Toti Scialoja, a friend of the very young Mario Schifano, Pino Pascali, Sergio Lombardo, Francesco Lo Savio. A few steps from the Academy, in Plinio De Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga in Piazza del Popolo, in 1960, he had his first solo exhibition. In Rome, Kounellis understands that there is no break with the art of the past; and in his works he often cites the masters who are his points of reference.
The exhibition is set up in what was originally simply a passage area, which connected the bank of the Tiber (where the barges and merchandise from the Umbrian hinterland arrived) and the interior of the city: a neoclassical style environment designed by Pietro Camporese the Younger in the mid-nineteenth century, inspired by the atrium designed by Antonio Sangallo the Younger for Palazzo Farnese, in the 16th century. Under the barrel vault decorated with coffers, one different from the other, the visitor to the Gac, like a modern-day Lilliputian, finds himself in front of the five iron trestles built out of scale, which support as many sheet metal paintings. They are iconoclastic sculptures which on the back bear a particular date, the year of birth of the painters particularly dear to the artist.
Kounellis wrote in 1985: “In Rome I found artist friends, with whom I could talk about not only contemporary art: we also discussed ancient painting in the trattorias until late, not in an academic way, but as if the protagonists were present at our table So I cultivated the consideration that the ancient, in reality, was part of an indispensable identity, and that the Modern is not a modernist exercise, but is placed within a widespread logic”. The five easels are in a dialectical relationship with space, without distance from those who look at them. “Rome itself imposes a continuous dialogue between past and present which is tangible at Gac: an exclusively Roman trans-epochal dialogue, today more necessary than ever”, says Miriam Mirolla, professor of psychology of art and who, as responsible for the external relations of the Academy, has opened collaboration with Florida International University since 2019. Precisely by virtue of this continuous dialogue between past and present, visiting Rome is a unique privilege, as students who have just arrived from Miami know well.