Photography Exhibition Gaggenau: Romanitas – From Braille to Stars

On the occasion of National Braille Day, Cramum, Gaggenau and Lelievre Paris launched the ROMANITAS exhibition by Fulvio Morella in Rome, curated by Sabino Maria Frassà. After the Braille Museum in Milan, the Gaggenau showroom in the Italian capital is hosting the second stage of the Blind Wood art project organized by Cramum to celebrate the bicentenary of Braille until July 31.

For this exhibition, the artist has designed a new body of work in which the dots at the base of Braille are transformed into stars. The central work of the exhibition is the new video work “ROMANITAS NFT” in which Fulvio Morella reflects on the very meaning of limit and darkness, a concept so prevalent in blindness: what is light? Accompanied by the notes of a piano, a music that the artist himself describes as “the music of the soul”, ROMANITAS NFT tells the echoes of the infinite of a never trivial and continuous search for the inner light. As curator Frassà explains, “Morella came to create a work of video art and to conceive the photographic documentation of his own performance after years during which he devoted himself almost exclusively to the creation of wooden sculptures. This material was the object of his research. The transition to the intangibility of the image is the result of a process of maturation and overcoming his own limitations. After all, his artistic research is ultimately a reflection on the arbitrariness of the very concept of limits.” It is no coincidence that the artist himself explains how “I realized that a video and a photographic image are as concrete as and as much as a sculpture. It is not a single sense that makes art, but the thought that allows the active and emotional involvement of those in front of us. I hope, therefore, to have conceived a video work that manages to touch and move the limits of each of us, leading us to go beyond and beyond the appearance.”

The exhibition is built around this work that accompanies the viewer, guiding his visit. We are all encouraged to come out of the darkness to see the stars and become conscious creators of our existence. It is not by chance that the artist has also conceived a performance, documented photographically: after having blindfolded his guests, he asks them about the works that he makes them discover with their hands, accompanied by the sound suggestions of ROMANITAS NFT. Far from any nihilistic drift, ROMANITAS NFT proves to be an almost programmatic work, which, through the involvement of all the senses, initiates in the spectator a process of re-awareness of oneself and of the inevitable eternal return that we live at every moment.