Felice Levini's arrows in Cosa Archaeological Park: the intervention for Hypermaremma

Hypermaremma has unveiled the second major project of the 2023 edition of the contemporary art review: it is Dal Giorno alla Notte (From Day to Night), a site-specific installation conceived by artist Felice Levini (Rome, 1956) for the Archaeological Park of the Ancient City of Cosa, in Ansedonia. Dal Giorno alla Notte tells the story of theancient colony founded by the Romans on top of the hill of Ansedonia in 273 B.C. after the conquest of Vulci and neighboring Etruscan territories. Combining mythology and symbolism, Felice Levini conceives a metaphysical scenario among the archaeological ruins and the remains of Roman temples, imagining a multitude of divine signals that, like thunderbolts, unequivocally indicate to the conquerors the place sacred to the gods.

Through his work, the artist wants to recover the inextricability of life and religion typical of the Roman world, marked by the continuous waiting for divine signals. Twelve cyclopean arrows of fiery red color pierce the ground of the Archaeological Park. Along with the arrows, as many stone slabs appear scattered among the ruins of the temples, evoking the names of the twelve main Roman deities: Apollo, Ceres, Diana, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Mercury, Minerva, Neptune, Venus, Vesta and Vulcan. Sudden signals and appearances that reveal themselves to the people of Rome without warning “from day to night.”

The images that spring from Felice Levini’s research compose a symbolic and ironic code that makes the contamination of languages, grafting and lucidity its stylistic hallmark. In contrasts, juxtapositions, decompositions and reversals, his work is continually renewed, generating unusual meanings, thus revealing unprecedented spaces of interpretation. The artist casually draws from literature, mythology, nature as well as from his most intimate and personal sphere.

“Felice Levini, once climbed near the Capitolium that crowns the Archaeological Park of the Ancient City of Cosa,” writes Massimo Belli in the text accompanying the exhibition, “pays homage to this vertical relationship, capable of marking the history of a place that the Romans elected as sacred in respect of the defeated who prayed to their deities in that same place. To do this, Levini strips off the shoes of the artist to put on those of Saturn, Time. Twelve metallic arrows, lit by a tone of bright red that verges on vermillion, pierce the ground, dotting the Arce of the Ancient City of Cosa with irrefutable divine signals. Like timeless archaeological relics, as many marble slabs bear the names of the deities of Roman Olympus in bronze letters: without any solution of continuity, these slabs emerge from the ground like warnings, signaling the continuity of the relationship between the human and the divine that dates back to the dawn of Mediterranean civilizations. The artist retrieves the Roman Capitolium, the Etruscan ritual cleft that resided beneath it, and transports them so far into the contemporary as to create a past for them. In this way, time dilates, almost stopping. Looking up at the arrows, one then realizes that these are nothing but sundials bearing the four axes, the Four Cardinal Points. As in a metaphysical landscape, we now find it impossible to comprehend a before and an after in relation to what is before our eyes. The polygonal opera walls of the temple, the tree bordering them, the foundations of the area dedicated to Mater Matutae become nothing more than a dechirichian backdrop that instead of housing statues-mannequin houses divine signals reduced to Euclidean geometries: arrows. Once absorbed within this dense time, the artist brings us back to the frenzy of reality by ironically shifting the work’s emphasis to chromatic impact. Light, which he captures through red paint, dialogues with its surroundings in the only color tone that can be used to create a contrast, to send an aesthetic signal. In this way, the typical luminosity of celestial intervention is represented, the same radiating on the wooden pole supporting Constantine’s tent in the Dream masterfully painted by Piero Della Francesca. Then emerges the dazzling rapidity of the encounter, the impossibility of continuous dialogue with the divine world reduced to brief signals to be interpreted, and thus the immeasurable smallness that marks human precariousness and gives the work its title.”

With this intervention by Felice Levini, Hypermaremma returns for the third time to one of the most special places in the Tuscan Maremma. After inaugurating the group show ’The Submerged City’ in 2019 and after presenting the performance ’The City of Thing’ and the sculpture ’Eight Double Cone with Mask’ by Francesco Cavaliere in 2022, a new site-specific intervention will once again make the Archaeological Park of the Ancient City of Cosa the protagonist.

The artist

Felice Levini was born Rome in 1956. An artist with a classic dexterity and ironic and biting poetics, Felice Levini, through his work, stages episodes of life showing its irreverent and pressing side. An artist educated in references-from classicism to art history to mythology and Italian social history, Levini has agitated and taken part in the contemporary Italian scene of the second half of the 20th century, working mainly in Rome, Turin and Milan with leading institutions. The artist maintains a close artistic dialogue with the works of Alighiero Boetti and Gino De Dominicis, whom he cites and takes up in several works. The relationship with Salvo, important for his artistic developments, will foster his entry into the cultural world of Turin in the early 1980s. Very young, in 1978 he opened an artists’ self-managed space in Via Sant’Agata dei Goti in Rome together with colleagues and friends Giuseppe Salvatori and Claudio Damiani in order to give rise to evenings dedicated to the encounter between art, poetry and music. The project was recently further explored at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in DEDICATED | S. Agata de’ Goti 1978-1979. In 1980 he was among the first artists to join the Nuovi-Nuovi group sponsored by critic Renato Barilli. In the 1990s his language became increasingly unpredictable, introducing performative activity and human presence into his work. Over this two decades, the artist participated in no less than two Biennales - the XLIII in 1988 and the XLV in 1993 - and two Quadrennials, in ’86 and ’96. His work continues into and within the new millennium through collaborations with numerous art galleries and museum institutions such as: the Acquario Romano (2002), La Galleria Nazionale (2013), Museo Macro (2016), Auditorium Parco della Musica di Roma (2016), Galileo Chini (2020) and the Aranciera di Villa Borghese (2021).

Pictured: Felice Levini’s installation for Hypermaremma 2023. Photo by Daniele Molajoli, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Niccoli, Parma

Felice Levini's arrows in Cosa Archaeological Park: the intervention for Hypermaremma

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