Description
An overpass crosses the canvas diagonally, cutting across the urban space with a clean line. Beneath it, buildings, multi-story parking garages, residential towers, and commercial structures are layered—a contemporary landscape of overlapping, intersecting planes with no apparent hierarchy.
Passages of an Unusual Landscape is born from the urban survey that Roberta Buccellati has been conducting in the suburbs of Genoa since 2002. The work translates into painting what photography has documented: an area where road infrastructure—elevated roads, interchanges, overpasses—has profoundly altered the urban fabric, creating other spaces, devoid of identity, places of pure transit.
The overpass dominates the composition with its dark mass. The central pylon bears the vertical sign “TICKET”—an urban sign that references the functional nature of the space: parking, transportation, and commerce.
The light is cold, almost aseptic —typical of contemporary non-places. The sky is a pale blue, almost faded, occupied more by architecture than by emptiness. There are no people, no vegetation: only buildings overlapping with buildings, infrastructure begetting more infrastructure.
The title reveals the work’s intent: these are passages —places through which one passes without inhabiting them—but they are also a landscape, albeit an unusual one. Roberta paints them with an anthropological approach: she doesn’t judge, but documents.
