Bar Far

Space is not something objective and real, but a form of our sensibility.
— Immanuel Kant

The recent opening of Bar Far within Villa Lontana’s space on Via Garibaldi transforms the traditional concept of an exhibition into an unprecedented sensory experience, where art and conviviality intertwine. It is not merely an exhibition: it is an actual bar, an environment in which visitors are invited to sit, converse, and sip a drink while immersed in a total artwork encompassing sculpture, painting, architecture, and performance.

Villa Lontana is not just another gallery. Established in 2018 from the archaeological and curatorial vision of the Santarelli Foundation and directed by Vittoria Bonifati, the institution has developed an exhibition practice that investigates the connections between ancient and contemporary, between cultural sediment and the future of sensation. With the opening of its new space in the heart of Trastevere, the “villa lontana” — historically located outside the city walls — transforms geographical distance into a metaphysical displacement: physical isolation becomes a prism, a way of inhabiting critical thought and experiential perception through art.

Bar Far is therefore more than an exhibition: it is a Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work — dissolving the separation between environment and artwork, function and symbol. Conceived by artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page, the project evokes the memory of historic art-bars such as Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, London’s Colony Room, or Rome’s celebrated Caffè Greco, favored by Giorgio de Chirico. Yet the project does not indulge in nostalgia; rather, it reactivates that cultural logic in a time of global instability: spaces that once emerged during moments of crisis as refuges for experimentation and exchange now reappear as devices of meaning.

The interior scenography is dominated by strong contrasts: plaster bas-reliefs, sculpted human limbs, and anatomical fragments emerge from the walls as if the space itself were alive and in transformation; baroque architectural elements confront essential geometric surfaces, while Page’s painted trompe l’œil creates illusory depths that thrust the visual field between the real and the imaginary. The constructed surfaces seem to breathe, oscillating between corporeal presence and symbolic architectural setting.

Together, the two artists create an environment in which appearance and essence pursue one another. Sculptural elements emerge like relics from walls that seem to inhale and exhale; arms become supports, legs hold up benches, hands transformed into candelabra challenge the natural functioning of architecture. Page’s painted surfaces suggest infinite colonnades and spaces that seem to belong to other times, yet as one moves through the bar these visions distort: the illusion reveals itself, and with it the awareness of our own perceptual construction.

This continual displacement — between what we see and what we believe we see — opens a philosophical space: Bar Far is not merely to be looked at, but to be inhabited as an existential question. Illusion here is not deception for its own sake, but a practice of knowledge that unsettles the certainty of our eyes. The act of sitting down for a drink becomes a collective ritual of contemplation, a confrontation with fundamental contradictions of the human condition: true/false, presence/absence, construction/ruin.

Ultimately, Bar Far is not a simple exhibitionary installation, but a restless and stratified environment that brings explicit contrasts to the surface: ancient and contemporary, functional and symbolic, empirical and imaginary. Here the visitor is not a passive spectator, but a participant in a collective rite that interweaves illusions, bodies, and atmospheres — urging us to reflect on how art can be at once vision and a place of life.

Every act of perception is also an act of creation.
— Jean Piaget