Curated by Carlo Alberto Bucci
Exhibition promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale, Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and Fondazione Mattatoio di Roma – Città delle Arti
Produced by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in collaboration with Latitudo
In 1986, Alfredo Zelli held his first exhibition in Rome at Ugo Ferranti’s gallery, then a key figure in promoting experimental and avant-garde artistic languages. In the same year, he exhibited at Yvon Lambert in Paris and at Annina Nosei in New York. Forty years after his debut, this exhibition of the Roman artist takes on an anthological character, yet remains conceived as a solo show, featuring more than forty of his works.
Alfredo Zelli uses painting for his creations and shapes materials with the eye of a sculptor; yet, from the very beginning, he has identified in inhabitable, welcoming space the primary driving force of his work.
The first piece visitors encounter upon entering the Pavilion is the large installation Untitled (1999), which evokes an architectural niche at whose center an oval form emerges, recalling Piero della Francesca. Opposite this work—made of wood, cardboard, and tempera—is the acrylic on PET Tra giorno, notte, cielo e terra (Between Day, Night, Sky, and Earth) (2025–26), selected to represent the most recent developments of a research begun more than fifteen years ago. Here, the figure—mostly human and indebted to the volumetric language of Mannerist art—dematerializes along a perspective of transparent planes receding into depth.
The exhibition continues by placing works from the recent past in dialogue with those of the present: the rough surfaces and warm tones of the installation Untitled (1987) and of the tondo Madre oro (2007) interact with the translucent planes and vivid colors of more recent works such as Figura e spazio (Figure and Space) (2023) and Ipotesi metaverso (Metaverse Hypothesis). In Tutto è nascente (Everything Is Emerging), a three-dimensional structure presented at Hyunnart Studio in 2023, painted PET sheets radiate around a central pole, offering the viewer the image of a body in motion traversed by light. The transparent surfaces composing the work—on which colors gather in layered veils—are arranged in sequences that echo, from afar, Futurist experiments.
The exhibition invites viewers to reconstruct, through their own gaze, the figures and identities present in the paintings. Paraphrasing the well-known Latin expression found in Franciscan and Cistercian hermit contexts, Beata multitudo thus refers to humanity, in its development through the history of art and the sacred.