Villa Medici, Three Exhibitions Exploring the Contradictions of Modernity

 

Black Sun. Oil and Contemporary Art: The Dark Matter of Modernity 

Oil is one of the most emblematic substances of contemporary civilization. It has powered industries, transportation, economies and collective imaginaries, becoming a promise of virtually unlimited development. But every promise of power contains its own reverse side: dependency, environmental devastation, conflict and inequality. Black Sun takes this contradiction as its starting point for examining the relationship between art, natural resources and power. 

Curated by Morad Montazami, Madeleine de Colnet and Caroline Courrioux, the exhibition continues the cycle devoted to the elements launched by Villa Medici in 2022. Following stone and water, oil introduces a material that belongs not only to geology but also to the political and economic history of the world. Through works by contemporary artists and by artists who anticipated some of today's most pressing issues, the exhibition explores how the oil industry has transformed landscapes, shaped relations between the Global North and the Global South, and helped shape the sensibility of modernity. 

Here, oil is not merely a fuel or an environmental problem. It is a structure of power, a substance capable of determining hierarchies, directing economies and making certain territories indispensable to the well-being of others. Its history is also a history of extraction: not only of resources from beneath the earth, but of value extracted from places and populations that often bear the costs without benefiting to an equivalent degree. 

The title, Black Sun, already contains a contradiction. The sun is traditionally the source of life, light and energy; black reverses its image, evoking a compromised luminosity, a source of power that carries within itself the shadow of its own destructiveness. Oil thus becomes a metaphor for a civilization that has made energy the foundation of its progress, without managing to separate growth from the devastation that accompanies it. 

In this sense, the exhibition does not merely represent the climate crisis: it invites us to recognize the cultural depth of a system that has turned the exploitation of resources into an apparently inevitable horizon. Art, too, is called into question, because it does not exist outside the material conditions that make its production, circulation and preservation possible. 

What forms of desire has oil fostered, what images of well-being has it made credible, and how much of our idea of the future remains trapped in an energy model that compromises the very conditions for its existence? 

Black Sun thus shifts the discussion from ecological emergency to a critique of the imagination: because a civilization does not truly change when it recognizes the consequences of its actions, but when it begins to question the assumptions that made those actions possible. 

François Morellet. Roman Picnic: Rigour as a Form of Irony 

If Black Sun addresses the contradictions of the system through matter, the exhibition devoted to François Morellet examines them through form. On the occasion of the centenary of the French artist's birth (1926–2016), Villa Medici presents five works in its historic spaces, bringing geometric abstraction into dialogue with Renaissance architecture. 

Morellet was one of the leading figures in abstract art during the second half of the twentieth century. His work is based on systems, rules, geometries and procedures that seem to remove the artwork from individual arbitrariness. Lines, angles, grids and combinations become tools for constructing a language in which composition depends not exclusively on the artist's subjective expression, but on the application of predetermined principles. 

Yet it would be reductive to interpret this research as a celebration of rationality. Morellet also uses rigour to put rigour itself into crisis. His rules do not necessarily lead to harmony; they can produce dissonances, paradoxes, ironic effects and situations in which order reveals its artificial nature. Rather than guaranteeing a definitive truth, geometry becomes a device for testing how fragile our trust is in systems that claim to organize reality. 

This is where abstraction acquires a critical dimension. A rule can liberate, but it can also constrain; a system can make the world intelligible, but it cannot exhaust its complexity. Morellet seems to suggest that intelligence does not consist in eliminating the absurd, but in recognizing it within the very mechanisms that produce order. 

The encounter with Villa Medici introduces a further layer of interpretation. Contemporary works enter into a relationship with a place steeped in history, proportions, symmetry and representations of power. The encounter between Morellet's geometry and historic architecture is not merely an exercise in visual harmony: it makes perceptible the distance between different conceptions of order, between the monumentality of a tradition and a modern practice that also uses precision to subvert expectations. 

The title, Roman Picnic, also suggests a certain lightness: the irruption of play into a solemn setting, the possibility of inhabiting history without necessarily submitting to its authority. Rigour does not exclude enjoyment, just as seriousness is not synonymous with solemnity. Indeed, it is precisely irony that prevents method from turning into dogma. 

Morellet's geometry does not promise to resolve contradictions. It stages them. In doing so, it restores a particular freedom to art: the freedom to follow a rule without obeying it blindly, to construct an order while simultaneously revealing its limits. 

Francis Picabia. Landscape: When Reality Begins to Dissolve 

The third exhibition centres on a single work: Landscape (1909) by Francis Picabia, presented in the historic rooms of Villa Medici. A painting may seem too limited an object to sustain an entire exhibition, but it is precisely this concentrated scale that allows us to observe a decisive transition in the history of modern art: the gradual transformation of representation, as the visible world ceases to be a model to be faithfully reproduced and becomes material to be reworked. 

The work is presented in dialogue with the retrospective Picabia, Opening the Doors of Night at Palazzo Reale in Milan. Its significance in the Roman context also lies in the opportunity to observe a transitional phase: the landscape remains recognizable as a pictorial genre, but stands on the threshold of an artistic exploration that will lead towards abstraction. 

In the Western tradition, landscape has never been merely a portion of nature. It is also a construction of the gaze: a way of selecting, ordering and organizing space, of determining what deserves to be represented and from which point of view. Modern painting progressively challenges this presumed neutrality. The picture is no longer necessarily a window open onto the world; it can become an autonomous space in which colours, marks and forms assert their own existence. 

In Picabia, this transition is particularly significant because it anticipates an artistic practice resistant to definitive identities and rigid affiliations. His career will move across different languages and positions, turning instability and provocation into tools of artistic inquiry. His refusal to settle on a single style will become one of the most recognizable characteristics of his work. 

Landscape allows us to approach that moment when painting begins to free itself from the obligation of resemblance. This is not simply a matter of abandoning figuration, but of recognizing that seeing is not the same as passively recording what exists. Every image is already an interpretation; every representation presupposes a choice, a grammar, a relationship between the observer and what is being observed. 

The presence of the work at Villa Medici also takes on a particular significance in relation to Morellet. The two artists belong to different generations and follow different paths, but they share a desire to free art from established conventions. Morellet constructs systems to reveal their possibilities and paradoxes; Picabia moves through forms to prevent them from becoming a prison. In both, irony acts as an antidote to the claim that an aesthetic solution can become definitive. 

The single work therefore offers more than an opportunity to contemplate a moment in modern painting. It invites us to examine the process through which a language transforms, a certainty loses its solidity and a new possibility emerges before it has even acquired a fully formed name. 

Three Exhibitions, One Common Question 

The three exhibitions at Villa Medici should not be reduced to a single intention, nor forced into a theoretical framework that erases their differences. Their proximity, however, allows certain resonances to emerge. 

In Black Sun, it is the extraction-based model of development that reveals its contradictions. In Morellet, geometric order demonstrates that rationality is not immune to paradox. In Picabia, representation itself loses its apparent stability, opening the way to new forms of visual knowledge. 

The point of convergence is the crisis of structures we consider natural: progress, rules and images. Not because everything must dissolve into an indistinct relativism, but because no human construct can escape the need to be questioned. 

This is the most interesting possibility offered by the three-exhibition programme: recognizing that art is not merely the place where a civilization celebrates its achievements, but also where it can critically examine its own tools, dependencies and illusions. 

Oil fuels the world, geometry organizes it, painting represents it. But none of these operations is innocent or definitive. And perhaps it is precisely when certainties begin to crack that art becomes necessary once again: not to provide reassuring answers, but to make visible the questions that the present would prefer to avoid. 

Visitor Information 

Villa Medici – French Academy in Rome