EPIFANIA O IL TEMPO DI UNA SIGARETTA
RUDY CREMONINI
OPENING THURSDAY OCTOBER 16TH 2025
UNTIL TUESDAY DECEMBER 23RD 2025
epifania o il tempo di una sigaretta
Damiano gullì
"I make very few choices in my work. I don't choose the image to paint, I hardly choose the colors, and I don't even choose the level of abstraction to achieve. If I had to choose everything, I would lose the moment of surprise when I finish the work and I would lose the wonder of understanding the meaning of my work. I choose very little; rather, I try to follow a flow and keep it within certain boundaries, but I don't know the direction or the destination."
This is how Rudy Cremonini (Bologna, 1981) answered my question about his pictorial practice in an interview published in “Artribune” in 2019. Since that April six years have passed. Over time, Cremonini's work has changed and transformed, but inevitably, many of the elements that characterize his practice and poetics return in his recent works exhibited at the Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea gallery in Rome.
Starting with ‘non-choice’, a negation which, making space for ‘surprise’ and ‘wonder’, presupposes a serendipitous processual approach to the various stages involved in defining subjects and pictorial practice. And this is where epiphany comes in. According to the dictionary, it is ‘a manifestation of divinity in visible form’ and, literally, ‘an appearance, a manifestation’. An epiphany, therefore, is not sought or predetermined.
It is sudden. Fleeting.
In this case, the specific epiphanic episode can be traced back to Cremonini's recent journey to China. Hence the artist's fascination with the sacred dimension — which permeates the oriental culture and religion in an unavoidable way — towards meditative atmospheres and millennial rituals, as well as his attention to other geographies, both physical and mental, more or less familiar, perhaps exotic places and holiday destinations, estranged and brought back to suspended and somewhat faded atmospheres, already present in much of his previous work.
However, through the title chosen for the exhibition Cremonini plays with registers and, not without a certain irony, touches on the theme of time, both sacred – the sudden revelatory epiphany, in fact – and secular, the banal and the everyday, the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Cremonini's works, for example Il tempo di una sigaretta (The Time of a Cigarette) – a deckchair on which no one is sitting, abandoned in an undefined and only alluded space-time context – always imply constant waiting or an absence.
Emptiness and silence. Temporality is deferred and dilated. A suspension between action and inaction dictated by the artist's focus on an object or natural landscape in which the part becomes the whole, the detail becomes the objective correlative of a state of mind.
Fragments of nature, portions of domestic interiors, traces of liminal spaces, fluid forms that are not immediately distinguishable at first glance, organic or geometric, emerge freely, as in Bastava il contrario, Contare i passanti, Fiero, and in the Incarnazione series, consisting in a corpus of red artworks dedicated to the votive statues displayed in the showcases of some oriental museums. The unconscious also plays an important role, but it coexists with an extraordinary analytical aptitude and Cremonini's ability to bring the work back to a precise final formal rendering, poised between chaos and cosmos.
If time is central to his research, equally important are his reflections on vision, perception and representation developed through a fluid and evocative style of painting with “uncertain, corrupted” colors, according to the artist – yet invaded by a new light – which, regardless for the subjects, moves along the blurred boundary between figuration and abstraction and feeds into a broader and deeper investigation of this medium, carried out consistently over the years. Through watery brushstrokes and a careful process of subtraction in the construction of the composition, Cremonini veils the mimetic representation of reality in ambiguity and mystery. To open up to the emotion of the unexpected.