On the wire

There is a subtle balance between economy and culture, a balance that not everyone is able to perceive or rather underestimate, in the name of a certain purity of art. Purity that makes it niche and of an apparent greater value. It happens for music, literature, for all expressive languages ​​that risk commodification. They live in a sort of limbo, which wants to ennoble them among connoisseurs and at the same time make them accessible to as many people as possible. In the strange fear that what is popular is no longer of quality. We are led to believe that works of art are exempt from this system which actually encompasses them completely. What better example of the art gallery. A mysterious place poised between rule and intuition. Where the most important canvas often becomes the one that achieves the greatest economic value. I had never realized how much marketing had an impact on an environment that in my eyes had always appeared stately and detached from material logic. The gallery owner appeared to me as an attentive but shy critic, in search of strangeness rather than truth. Instead, finding figures from another time, real "merchants" in the old way. On the day dedicated to Spalletti, one of the most influential characters in the field, Lia Rumma, could not be missing. A woman who accidentally fell into a job that became a destiny.

Merchant, entrepreneur, curious spectator, who crosses the galleries of the world to find the right works to exhibit, the right character to bring to the public, in a search that remains surprisingly, always on the edge.

In her galleries I read this strong attention to the true relationship with space and what is exhibited, without the “many secretaries at the entrance to the American galleries”, as she herself describes the environments she has chosen.

It maintains in its appearance as in its work a simplicity that does not seem to suffer the pressures of the market, being perfectly within it. Will there be some secret behind this measure, or just luck and experience?

Chiara Silenus