Vincenzo Scolamiero

Like Lost Dreams
Curated by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Roberto Gramiccia
Casa Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen
Rome, Via Pasquale Stanislao Mancini 20
12 May – 22 June 2025
Opening: 12 May at 5:00 pm

PRESS RELEASE

On 12 May, the Casa Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen—part of the Pantheon and Castel Sant’Angelo Institute – National Museums Directorate of the City of Rome, in collaboration with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma—opens the solo exhibition of Vincenzo Scolamiero, Like Lost Dreams, curated by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Roberto Gramiccia.

For this occasion, Scolamiero presents six large canvases conceived specifically for Casa Andersen. The exhibition revolves around two installations in perfect harmony with the space, where the artist has scattered the traces of his inspiration: clods of earth, natural remnants and fragments, alongside the unfinished works of the house’s founder.

The very concept of the exhibition is integral to the project, shaping its path and clarifying its intention. It is not merely an installation but a journey in dialogue with a place that Scolamiero perceives as crystallized in time, dense with traces of life and creative experiences driven by a utopian vision: the dream of an ideal city, a perpetual laboratory where art would meet science, philosophy, music, religious thought, and aesthetics.

Hendrik Andersen’s visionary project—never realized—has fired Scolamiero’s imagination, guiding his expressive path. That utopia, a lost dream yet still radiating its imaginative power, is evoked in the exhibition’s title, Like Lost Dreams, drawn from a phrase in Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz, a much-loved work by Scolamiero. It evokes the hallucinatory, frenzied journey through a vertiginous and hostile nature—a metaphor for the artist’s condition, relentlessly driven to pursue the impossible completion of his creativity, the elusive and unattainable shore of his expressive dream.

In the six canvases, arranged as if along a path, every inspiration intensely experienced by the painter takes on figurative form: the universalist chimera of Andersen and the fascination of his still-intact utopian temple, now preserved as a museum; the evocation of a literary work that has long fueled Scolamiero’s imagination; the reflection on the very meaning of painting and of pursuing one’s restless phantoms without respite.

As curator Maria Giuseppina Di Monte notes:
“A phantasmagoria of poetic images that draw on nature and rework it through instantaneous visions, giving rise to further dreamlike visions; one sign generates another, until the canvases are saturated with greens and browns, the colors of the earth, so present in the artist’s works that they seem to spring from a natural orogenesis itself.”

The exhibition’s installation resonates with the environment, alternating between extremes: the melancholy, poignant dream suggested by the two vertical canvases placed in the atrium recesses—fragile, crystalline chinoiseries welcoming visitors to the former residence—and the immersive plunge into the earth’s depths suggested by the four paintings, supported by rough travertine structures, enclosing the viewer within a compressed and unsettling circuit.

From the shimmering gold of the entrance canvases—animated by sweeping strokes of red and green that enliven the air and level the space—the visitor is led into a feverish journey through an unstable, mysterious world, where the forces of nature, serene on the central plinth, suddenly surge to life, shaking spirits in the undulating rhythm of forms that emerge from a dark and windswept ground.

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