Add to cart

A monograph devoted to Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and his little known activity as a painter, to be admired in 34 works dating from the last decade of his life.

A monograph devoted to Roland Barthes (1915-1980) – a great protagonist of the French cultural period 1950-70, semiologist and linguist, scholar of spoken and written signs - and his little known activity as a painter, to be admired in 34 works dating from the last decade of his life.
Even in his painting Barthes seems to refer to his theories of language and his study of signs. They are always, and almost obsessively, characterised by labyrinthine signs, inextricable paths despite their geometric precision, which seem to become living material, by his studies and research but also and perhaps even more so by Barthes own life.
As Achille Bonito Oliva explains in his essay “Roland Barthes operates through the interpenetration of voluntary intervention and casualness, the interruption of the cause-effect relationship which allows for the introduction of discontinuous possibility of an element that leads to a perturbation, an abrupt increase of the intensity within the inertia of daily life. Since the language of art possesses the power of condensation beyond the rules of codified communication - a level of an unsociableness that can remain incontrollable.
Automatism, as used by Barthes, means the freedom of language to be, while adopting new meanings, thus he allows other forces to intervene in the work creating imperfections and disturbances in meaning to the point of transforming it into the area of a pure signifier, a deferment in a perpetual and aleatory movement which does not stabilise… the intensity is a truth which ignites the pictorial gesture and unfolds its own movement like an agglomeration along the flowing line of the drawing. It opens towards the Dionysian world of pure desire, the dense space of dreams. The automatism of gesture is directly proportional to that of the psyche, of what is known yet often reckless and involuntary. The material used by Barthes is the unconscious, and its energy, the imaginary that overflows. The imaginary is energy that not only touches the cortical level but also touches through the body, understood as an electric and magnetic field that generates a chain of emotions and unleashes impulses that, beyond the creative experience, would remain voiceless and discomposed.”

Rome, Palazzo Venezia
11^th March – 9^th May 2004