A RACE WITHIN HIMSELF

For Vincenzo Scolamiero, every exhibition—whether personal or collective—is an introspective journey. Painting, for him, is a process of reflection, listening, and meditation: the artist lets a slow, grasping, and powerful energy flow into the canvas, capturing a multitude of stimuli—physical, environmental, musical, poetic—and then allows them to pour into the hand that obeys the intellect.

Equally unique is the care he devotes to the environment: the choice of rooms, the relationship between works and space, the dialogue established between canvases and walls. At the Andersen House Museum, his observation of the place became perception, and then expressive necessity. In that residence, the Norwegian-American sculptor had imagined a grand utopia: the founding of an ideal city open to artists, scientists, and thinkers from around the world, a perpetual laboratory where science could meet the arts and speculative thought.

The statues, ancient casts, and the collection itself—suffused with the powerful presence of its author and collector—pushed Scolamiero in two directions: one new, leading him to confront the dream of an ideal world that a past artist had vainly sought to realize; the other more personal, stirred by the passion for poetry and music that has never abandoned him. Immersion in Andersen’s utopian imagination evoked in him that ineffable dream of completeness artists carry within, that unreachable chimera toward which they ceaselessly direct their search for the absolute.

Thus the exhibition became a path guiding the visitor through that ideal museum-laboratory. It welcomes the viewer in the atrium with a dream of elusive, lost beauty: a pair of canvases set into the wall recesses, gleaming with gold and stirring the air with light, fan-like sweeps of green and vermilion brushed across the surface. Then it propels the visitor toward a dark, mysterious embrace, where the phantoms of the house have handed over their visions to Scolamiero’s imagination, echoing one of his favorite readings: Lenz, the unfinished posthumous novella by Georg Büchner—a kind of frenzied, hallucinatory run through a vertiginous natural landscape. From that literary memory he drew the title of the exhibition, Like Lost Dreams, and that aimless journey culminates in the central hall, where four horizontal canvases are bound together in a rhomboid space, like a secret dance.

The vibrant luminescence of gold in the entrance paintings thus gives way to darker, restless spaces, from which beams of light emerge, weaving, unraveling, flattening, and crossing one another like linen ribbons or dense cobwebs stretched across geological depths, while leaves and flowering branches sway in the air like musical notes. It is the same grim, terrifying nature that accompanied the madman’s race, as the gray forest quivered beneath him and the mist alternately devoured the forms or half-revealed their mighty limbs. At the center of the four canvases, sustained by rough travertine structures, a large plinth displays the figurative stimuli that have always nourished Scolamiero’s painting: leaves and dry branches, berries, clods of earth, stones—every natural trace that captivates his gaze—here combined with fragments of Andersen’s works, the household’s Lares and Penates.

The whole forms a deeply personal and coherent exhibition dimension: the artist grappling both with his own dreams and with those of his host, in a virtuous contest between those who, across time, sought “something like lost dreams” yet never found it. Within the six canvases, every inspiration intensely lived by the painter takes form: the universalist enchantment of Andersen and the allure of this still-intact utopian temple, the evocation of a literary reading, the meditation on the very meaning of painting and of chasing one’s restless, unquiet phantoms.

Scolamiero’s show at the Andersen Museum is not a traditional exhibition nor an installation: it is rather a journey through dreams and utopias, where art is at once reason and imagination, reality and dream, illuminated path and unfathomable abyss.