Description
A red ” No Entry” sign stands out at the center of the composition, suspended between disjointed architecture: contemporary skyscrapers, an ornate historic villa, a streetlamp, and fragments of rationalist architecture. The intense blue sky occupies more than half the canvas—an open space that contrasts with the densely built environment.
Villa Gardino and its outskirts is one of Roberta Buccellati’s most recent works, a synthesis of her long-standing research on the relationship between man, the environment, and power.
The title explicitly names Villa Gardino —the historic building painted yellow ochre with decorative façade, a testament to a bygone era—and the contemporary suburbs that surround and suffocate it: office towers, glass structures, street signs. Two temporalities, two construction logics, two visions of space that coexist without harmonizing.
The “no entry” road sign becomes a central symbolic element: it not only regulates traffic but also denies passage. It is the device of power applied to the territory – something Roberta explores with an anthropological and philosophical approach.
The painting is realist but not photographic: it simplifies forms, exalting the contrasts between old and new, between memory and erasure. The panoramic horizontal format amplifies the sense of urban stratification —the city as a palimpsest where different eras overlap without resolution.
