Arte e fotografia: il dialogo delle immagini

The Coffee House of Palazzo Colonna, an artistic and architectural jewel in the heart of most aristocratic and Baroque Rome, hosts Arte e fotografia: il dialogo delle immagini (Art and Photography: The Dialogue of Images), the exhibition exploring one of the most fascinating relationships in visual history: that between painting and photography.

The relationship between these two fundamentally opposed art forms has been marked by a subtle rivalry, with photography seemingly challenging the primacy of painting. Today, however, it reveals itself as a fertile space of cross-pollination, mutual growth and, indeed, dialogue ‒ transforming them into accomplices that no longer repel one another, but observe, intersect and complete each other.

Curated by Michele Crocitto, whose vision brings together artists of different generations and perspectives, Arte e fotografia: il dialogo delle immagini builds a bridge between memory and contemporaneity.

Among the leading figures, Giuliano Grittini, a master of analogue photography and a key figure within the Italian art scene, presents a preview of his exhibition Roma Ti Amo (Rome, I Love You), including his celebrated interpretation of Marilyn Monroe, an iconic image poised between myth and pop culture.

Alongside him is the new generation represented by London-based photographer Jude Black, whose work moves between visual experimentation and a reflection on the image in the present day.

At the conceptual core of the exhibition lies the project Riflessi di Venere (Reflections of Venus), born from the collaboration between Jude Black and Anfissa Vassé: painting meets photography within a hybrid dimension where the artist’s body is no longer merely a subject, but becomes surface, material and language. Anfissa Vassé transforms into a Venus not depicted, but evoked ‒traversed by light, fragmented, almost dissolved. The images, set among rocky cavities and openings onto the sea, evoke archaic suggestions and references to myth. Overexposure becomes an aesthetic gesture: a controlled “burn” that does not erase, but opens new layers of interpretation. The female figure emerges and disappears, an apparition never fully revealed.

Anfissa Vassé also presents a series of paintings that extend and amplify the narrative, creating a continuous flow between painterly gesture and photographic image. In this process, painting takes shape as both reflection and reinterpretation of the photographic image: an inquiry into how the artist perceives herself not only as author but as an integral part of another artist’s work. The result is a double mirror ‒ between photography and painting, between subject and vision ‒ where identity dissolves and recomposes itself. Her reflection culminates in the performative dimension of Anfissa Vassé, who, during the inaugural vernissage aperitif on Friday 10 April at 5:00 pm within the spaces of Palazzo Colonna, will create a live painting and body painting performance on a model, transforming the body into a living, ever-changing surface. The painterly gesture, executed in real time, will render the creative process visible, staging the transition from image to matter.

The theme of the female figure, which runs throughout the exhibition in multiple forms, reappears in Pietro Gottuso, who presents the series Ritratti femminili (Female Portraits) ‒ a sensitive reflection on identity and the complexity of the feminine universe ‒ and in Anna Semyannikova, who introduces the collection Soglia (Threshold), an exploration of limits ‒ between light and darkness, control and desire ‒ where the image becomes a psychological space. It is also found in Jude Black (Judeblackphotography), who exhibits the triptych Tra veglia e vertigine (Between Wakefulness and Vertigo), set within domestic interiors transformed into symbolic scenarios in which the female figure loses stability, oscillating between presence and absence, seduction and withdrawal.

The exhibition is completed by a plurality of voices that enrich the display: Alex Valenti, Angelika Aks, Armsx, Cinzia Colantoni, Daniela Veronese, Marco Vinci, Paola Luciani Fullbright, Rosella Giorgetti, and the sculptures of Andrea Borga. Artists diverse in language and sensibility, yet united by their ability to construct a complex visual mosaic in which each work becomes part of a collective narrative.

Cover: Marilyn Monroe by Giuliano Grittini