Riccardo Ajossa’s ‘Esercizi di carta’, color and alchemical synthesis between East and West

Paper as a synthesis and alchemical element, transformation of thought and grammar of a work that draws inspiration from old prints, from color experiments, from travels to the borders between East and West. It will be the first time of the artist Riccardo Ajossa in the capital (from 7 April to 14 May at the Spazio Nuovo) with the exhibition ‘Hanji Unfolded – Korean paper exercises’ curated by Guillaume Maitre and Paulo Pérez Mouriz. A unique exhibition with works and creations made using the ancient Korean Hanji technique. Ajossa is a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and an artist but underlying any of his other activities there is the ineluctable need to investigate the matter. For over twenty years he has directed his research to every moment of the life of paper and in the last seven years he has embraced the study of Hanji paper. For simplification, it is defined as a technique but its genesis has rhythms, gestures, sounds that bring it closer to a ceremonial. First the barks are cleaned and then they are boiled. Subsequently, they beat each other with sticks whose beating cadence and generates a community work time. Chorality in doing is indispensable in order to reach the realization of the charter. The 14 large-format papers are exhibited free from any other element of the research. There are, as in the past, no traces of the creative process. They emerge, alone, in their presence. They are themselves the object and subject of the artistic operation. In addition to the paper, there is another protagonist element of the exhibition and it is the natural color of vegetable origin. In color, left free to express itself, there is the physical world in which Riccardo is immersed. The fields where he collects the eucalyptus bark, the elderberry and pomegranate berries are the ones next to his home where he will then squeeze the pigments, boil them and fix them with salts with that skilful, cadenced doing industriousness of those who live in harmony with his his chosen city of Rome, where Riccardo Ajossa lives and works. He is full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he set up the first laboratory for the production of artisan paper using Eastern and Western methods applied to contemporary art. His works are kept at the Benaky Museum in Athens, at the Bilotti Museum in Rome-Cosenza, at the Museum of the Pontifical Council of the Vatican and at the National Library of Rome.