"Unicuique Suum Fussball", the latest exhibition by Pietro Roccasalva – at the Johnen gallery in Berlin until June 5th - might seem, to those who upon entering encounter the paintings and installations with a characteristic mix of curiosity and apprehension, to be a collection of ghosts. At the entrance, the viewer is greeted by a stack of newspapers, L'Osservatore Romano, from which the artist has expunged, by means of cutting them out, the Latin phrase which roughly translates as "To Each His Own". Watching over the column is the icon of a small dragon lizard, that, as depicted, seems to lean out from its frame toward the viewer like a sort of guardian that might be either dangerous or unaware.
On one wall of the main room is the photograph of a lawn, whose exact size has been removed from the room's floor: another cropping, another absence, something that looks like it might be there, yet isn't. On the same rectangle, in the performance Truka all-over (The Phantom of the formula), two figures in armour paint each other with the colour characterised by their undergarments. Something hidden appears, hiding the rest, which exists but is no longer there.
The third room is probably the most intense. One wall is occupied by a painting from the series Il traviatore. A waiter is depicted in Roccasalva's usual, almost horrific, unsettling manner. One can imagine that the customer had ordered an orange soda: what the waiter brings him, however, is a juicer. The tray is certainly not empty, and seems to allude to whatever was ordered. But is there the desired object, or not? Probably both. The room is completed by a projector that alternates between a single frame from Pasolini's La Ricotta – a still life with a basket of fruit – and a drawing by Roccasalva in which the basket becomes the support of an aerostat. Things transform themselves. If there is anything, between the still life and the tableaux vivant, it must be part of both the states of the body. Here, too, a ghost?
Vincenzo Latronico
