Curated by Nicoletta Provenzano
Drawing, engraving, graphite and photoengraving are the artist’s preferred techniques. In this exhibition, they trace an itinerary centred on the theme of travel as a poetic key and symbolic device for exploring the profound connection between the unconscious and matter, memory and imagination, dream and cosmos. Through works on paper, copper plates and notebooks, Lelario constructs a captivating and magnetic aesthetic language.
At the heart of an intimate and imaginative journey of signs and symbols, two model trains, built to a scale of 1:87, materialise thought and the unconscious as an ideal state of perpetual motion, suspended between places and identities, an allegory of a nomadic philosophy and a time without coordinates. They merge with the exploratory and enigmatic world of the artist’s notebooks. The train, an alter ego of the soul in motion, thus becomes a metaphor for destiny and a figure of the imagination: a continuous passage between reality and possible destinations.
Around this “story along a journey”, the exhibition unfolds as an exploration traversing soul, universe and psyche, fantasy and reality, dream and mystery, articulated through an intimate and diaristic narrative.
The exhibition intertwines Jungian studies of archetypes, embodying the different stages of the Soul, with imaginary landscapes evoking a narrative journey through the rarefied atmosphere of the Grand Tour and the Castelli Romani. It ventures into the galactic universe and neural networks, tracing cosmic and mental maps. Engraving and photoengraving become tools for investigating the radiant energy that structures both the matter of the cosmos and that of the human interior. The line becomes delicate and branching, in a continuous symbolic germination that embraces the enigma of existence and the depths of the unconscious.
Moving between the territories of the visible and the dreamed, the two mirror-image Frecciarossa trains cross mental landscapes scattered with filaments of signs and vibrating lines. At once concrete and imaginary, the trains undertake a fantastical journey in which time and space expand, conveying the fluid dimension of thought and identity.
Three notebooks containing pen drawings then form the heart of the Diaries of a Journey, in which Lelario opens the pages of a visual diary and leads the viewer into the territories of thought and the unconscious. These minute explorations compose an intimate universe in which microcosm and macrocosm intertwine in a poem of forms, revealing enigmas and visions held within the surface of the paper. The travel notebooks thus become a canvas of the unconscious: intimate maps in which the line draws the landscape of the soul, in a visual narrative suspended between consciousness and dream.
Un racconto lungo un viaggio gives further substance and form to Andrea Lelario’s dreamlike and visionary investigation, culminating in the acquisition of two notebooks for the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
Andrea Lelario was born in Rome in 1965. His artistic education began at the Accademia di Belle Arti in the capital, where his encounter with Pippo Gambino and the Engraving Techniques course marked the beginning of a practice that from the outset moved between technical rigour and symbolic depth. For Lelario, it is the line—engraved, traced and layered—that becomes the privileged instrument of an inner language taking shape between matter and imagination.
In 1996, he created a mosaic for the Numidio Quadrato metro station in Rome, the first public art intervention of his career. Over the years, his works have entered important collections, including the Print Rooms of Edinburgh and Glasgow and the Monumental Complex of San Michele in Ripa Grande, part of the General Directorate of Archives of the Ministry of Culture in Rome, while his research has continued to consolidate its position within the national exhibition scene.
In 2003, he was invited to the XIV Quadriennale di Roma; in 2011, he participated in the 54th Venice Biennale; and in 2014, he won the 65th Premio Fondazione Michetti. In 2017, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica dedicated the exhibition Perentoria figura to his work, bringing together a substantial part of his production and recognising its importance within contemporary printmaking.
His artistic vision, always engaged in dialogue with the dreamlike and unconscious dimensions, has also extended onto the international scene. In 2018, he was among the protagonists of the exhibition Aurigae at Tao Xichuan in China. In 2021, he was a member of the scientific committee of the International Digital Print Art Exhibition Biennale. Since 2022, he has been a tutor in the National PhD Programme in Cultural Heritage Sciences at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. In 2024, he presented a substantial body of his work in the exhibition Nomadi del sogno at Mattatoio di Roma, Azienda Speciale Palaexpo. Also in 2024, he participated in the 5th IAPA Printmaking Biennale and the Academic Symposium on the theme “Evolving Technology and Eternal Printmaking” at the Xi’an Art Museum in Shaanxi Province, China.
Alongside his artistic practice, Lelario has also devoted himself to education. Between 2019 and 2020, he served as Director of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. Since 2019, he has been Vice President of the IPI at the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing, strengthening an open dialogue between East and West, tradition and experimentation.
His works are held in numerous public and private collections in Italy and abroad, including the Gabinetto delle Stampe di Bagnacavallo (RA), the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, the Achille Bertarelli Print Collection at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Museo Fondazione Michetti in Francavilla al Mare (CH), the Print Rooms of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence.