Oltre le scale. Bagliori nel buio

Saturday 27 May 2023, on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition "Oltre le scale. Bagliori nel buio" by Enrico Meo - open until 24 June - the Galleria Arte Toma (RC) presents Sottogiudecca, the new exhibition and performance space entirely dedicated to contemporary art in Reggio Calabria.

Sottogiudecca is an open, multidisciplinary project idea that trespasses on the unexpressed potential of the 100 cubic metres hidden in the underground of Via Giudecca 23. A collective memory of the city and an evident trace of its human and urban stratification, it is the only pedestrian artery that connects the waterfront to the upper city via the treadmill and its monumental historic staircase. The Toma gallery - a garrison of art since 1912 - starts from here with a place for research and experimentation, intimate and deliberately hostile. Sottogiudecca exists under the radar, like a submarine in the bowels of the city's anthropic landscape.

“Oltre le scale” is an invitation to step out of the ordinary and take a risk. Like standing on the edge of a precipice and stretching towards infinity, just to feel closer to oneself.
The cycle of Jonah and the Big Fish - which circularly opens and closes the exhibition - is a declaration of intent. Entering the belly of Sottogiudecca, the viewer is "called" to a conscious reflection on the capitalist system, which has relegated man to an instrumental function, mortifying his true nature. The aesthetic and moral decadentism of our age has fuelled a distorted anthropocentric conception, in which art - in its totalising sense - remains the only key to a more authentic spiritual experience. Inspired by the contemplative dimension of the hypogeum of Sottogiudecca, the artist imagines a private place of worship, in which he stages a personal hagiography of contemporary man in a Byzantine key. Icons bearers of a pagan sacredness, in which "the example of life" arises from the interweaving of parable, dream and memory. Tackling ancestral themes and fears with a narrative dense with symbols, the projection of his alter-ego cohabits with that of the shadow-angel. Mysticism and pantheism merge in a cosmogony of fiery skies and deserts, fallen angels, tattooed bodies and lost heads. The project room becomes a "martyrion" built around a holy relic, the nerve centre of the entire exhibition.