An artist obsessed with maps, flags, the footprints of space and time. An antique bookshop in the heart of Rome that looks as popping out from Balzac’s novel The Magic Skin. An art curator and travelling reporter who thinks that all the places you can imagine are real. The exhibition Journey Analogue comes from this combination of people and places. Luca Di Luzio artworks transforms Antica Libreria Cascianelli - just behind Navona square and beside the entrance of the archaelogical site of Domitian Stadium – in a contemporary wunderkammer, with the help of stage designer Valentina La Rocca (Libreria Cascianelli co-owner) and art writer Fabio Sindici. The title pays homage to Renè Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue, a surrealist chronicle of an impossible journey. The result is an art installation conceived both as hide and seek game and exploration in a parallel universe. The maps that Di Luzio creates with the imprints of his anatomy plays with ancient travel books; the fake animal skins maculate in printed geographical contours of real  countries wink to exotic stuffed birds, relics of centuries old travels; captions are substitued by poetry fragments similar to the erratic thoughts of an imaginary traveller.

"This solo show of Luca Di Luzio is at halfway between a classic exhibition and an immersive art installation formed by accurately selected works put in relation with the old volumes, maps, posters of an antique Roman bookshop. The idea, with Di Luzio and Valentina La Rocca, co-owner of Antica Libreria Cascianelli, was to create a symbiotic, even if temporary, association between a young artist and an atmospheric place full of precious objects and oddities, on the border line between art and literature, rationalism and freed imagination". (Fabio Sindici, Curator)

(Photo: Courtesy Antica Libreria Cascianelli)

Where: Antica Libreria Cascianelli, Rome. Dates: Until May 3, 2023