Project for the Mondrian Suite art gallery on Via dei Piceni in Rione San Lorenzo with golden green rough plaster and arched mirror altar with black trumpets lamps
Work
Antonino Cardillo
He must pronounce a curse on love, he must renounce all joys of love, before he masters the magic, a ring to forge from the gold. — R. Wagner
Crepuscular Green is an interior refurbishment of an art gallery. The use of colour and texture is inspired by the opening scene of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which describes a greenish dawn as seen from the depths of the river. This work was made on a low budget with one builder. The poverty of means applied here relates to the idea of architecture being a faculty to transcend the ordinary. Like a green golden grotto, a rusticated vault envelopes the upper part of the room, rendering a trilithon schema on the backdrop. Ahead, a rounded altar features a mirror arched bridge and a suspended slab above. On either side, two black flutes emit diffused lighting. Everything is painted in shades of green. Words of the space relate to each other a cohesive narrative, which aims to unfold the imagination of the inhabitants.
Place: Mondrian Suite, Via dei Piceni, 41, Rome, Italy
Area: 40 m² (one storey)
Typology: art gallery
Credits
Architecture design, construction management: Antonino Cardillo
Client: Mondrian Suite (director: Vincenzo Petrone alias Klaus Mondrian)
Constructor: Grigoriu Cicau
Furniture making: Stefano Coacci
Lamp making: Armand Darot
Bar counter design: Antonino Cardillo
Photography, text: Antonino Cardillo
Thanks to Ana Araujo, Paolo Bedetti, Andrea Paolo Massara, Vittorio Valenta
Reference
Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, WWV 86A, Königliches Hof und National Theater, Munich, 22 Sept. 1869; En. ed. Andrew Porter, The Ring of the Nibelung, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1976, p.17.
Egyptian? Greek? Roman? It doesn’t really matter, because once these ancestral images are deposited in our unconscious they are emptied of their historical specificity.
Design Exchange, no. 12, London, Aug. 2015, p. 109. (en)
With 40 square metres rather manageable, the architect has transformed the gallery into a sacred space—and created a courageous change from the eternal white cube.
Often we contemporaryists have a too rigid and ideological view of the subject, forgetting that contemporary is first of all what happens now and not already ‘as aesthetically’ happens. In this sense, the proposal of the architect Cardillo is like an artistic installation, an out of context: precisely in its difference with the total white of the rest of the exhibition space, it emphasises the possibility and the hope that non-homogeneous languages, but with sometimes similar roots, return to talk to each other in an intellectual dialogue that can make contemporaneity rich in ferments and new Now the two rooms coexist in a philosophical dialogue. The new entrance hall spiritually welcomes the audience, prepares it and arranges it towards the exhibition environment that has deliberately remained white, as before. And precisely this difference, measured by a corridor with a skylight, creates surprise and amazement. It invites to the possibility, to any possibility of encounter between not already ‘the’ contemporary but rather ‘the’ many contemporaries, whom we could and should dispose of.
email, Rome, 1 Apr. 2014. (it)
Publications
2019–2014 (selected)
Antonino Cardillo, ‘A synchronicity of cultures and civilisations’, paper presented to the Dessauer Gespräche, ed. Johannes Kister, Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau Institute of Architecture, 13 Nov. 2019. https://www.antoninocardillo.com/en/anthology/of-the-architect/articles/a-synchronicity-of-cultures-and-civilisations/
