Rooms with untouched beds, crumpled sheets, colourful curtains, wooden wardrobes and soft carpets are the subjects of the Project Room of Andrea Ventura, titled Nelle Braccia di Morfeo (In the Arms of Morpheus).
“The rooms are fantasies of life that I have never lived. Their repetition gives me the illusion of an infinite existence full of possibilities”. Ventura’s bedrooms are symbolic places of transit outside time and space, whose temporary owners have either just arrived or left. Although uninhabited and stripped of almost every decorative element, the rooms retain traces of their anonymous inhabitants inside, for example, in the crumpled pillows or wrinkled blankets. The simplicity of the rooms means that the entire focus is on the bed, “a parallelepiped loaded with meaning, not only physical but also mental”, where often “some of the most important things take place”. The centrality of the object is also underlined by the light, soft or grazing, which gives the space an intimate and personal atmosphere. For the rooms, each one different from the next, the artist is inspired by scenes from films, houses he has visited, or hotel rooms he has stayed in, as well as paintings and photographs he has found. Other times, however, these are just inventions, the result of his imagination.
“In our time [the bed] has been turned into an icon. Freud’s bed covered with the Persian carpet and velvet cushions with its evocative power has become an object in its own right. A sculpture”.
– Andrea Ventura
