blowart contemporary space, a new space dedicated to contemporary art in the heart of Rome’s Aurelio district, will inaugurate its exhibition programme with Scarlet, a solo exhibition by Emanuela Mastria, curated by Roberta Melasecca.
On a single wall of the exhibition space, the artist creates an installation composed of a myriad of approximately 200 scarlet porcelain petals, thus initiating a series of reflections that will accompany the project until 17 January 2027 and continue through subsequent exhibitions.
Indeed, blowart aims not only to offer opportunities for exhibitions, but also to create spaces and mechanisms for dialogue and exchange around issues that have now become particularly urgent and unavoidable. Through the initial definition of two words — kindness and resistance — Emanuela Mastria’s installation seeks to set in motion a relay of words, opening up a deeper exploration of the system that connects us to the ecosystem of which we are part, the ways in which habitats and communities are transformed, and the relationships that develop within them.
“Emanuela Mastria works with porcelain, usually white. For Scarlet, porcelain is red, scarlet, and the colour is embedded in the material itself.
Scarlet is colour; it is the first colour newborns recognise when they open their eyes to the world. It is essence and life, a primordial breath.
Scarlet is a woman’s name, and red is the colour of red shoes, red benches, the colour of the red strawberries on the handkerchief dedicated to Desdemona, part of the project Il fazzoletto di Desdemona (Desdemona’s Handkerchief), in which each of the 100 white porcelain handkerchiefs is dedicated by Emanuela Mastria to a woman who was a victim of femicide, whose initials are written in red.
Red is the red of roses proclaiming: ‘We want bread and we want roses too.’
Red is matter taking shape through hands and thought.
Scarlet is Emanuela Mastria’s installation on the white wall of blowart: with red, the artist shapes 200 petals and scatters them across the wall, touching one point at a time, through a gesture that is intrinsically conscious. Art, like poetry, possesses an advantage: it mediates nothing precisely because of its specific nature, because it is necessarily and deliberately indeterminate. This is why art allows itself to speak, and we allow ourselves to understand; through it, we have the opportunity to engage, to discuss, and not merely to look.
Scarlet possesses an undefined structure, thus outlining a new human, urban and social grammar; Scarlet generates an independent space and leaves room for us, for our words, for our reflections.
The word is therefore yours.”
For Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Art Day), the exhibition will be open from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm and from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm.
