The Sky in a Room, domestic landscape and synthetic fine arts / LAPIS

LAPIS presents an operational research method focused on a technical deconstruction of the work of art as a tool for reading architectural space and built form in their historical and constructive dimension. From the domestic interior seen through the eye of the artist painting, it is possible to reconstruct a social history of housing culture and redefine typological elements and topological characters of the European bourgeois home. From the magic realism of everyday life unfolds a genealogy of banal heroism and a phenomenology of domestic space.
The investigation focuses on the definition of a set of elements that constitute reality beyond the canvas: architecture language and spatial relationships, compositional tropes between domestic objects and related viewpoints, resonance between materials and specific atmospheric conditions; all through decoding the painter’s narrative filter, in an operational critique of art history resorting to a scientific approach. The dichotomy between digital transition and analogue continuity emerges as the underlying theme. Architectural representation, constantly redefines itself by its working tools, yet posits a discourse in continuity with the pictorial tradition in search of ‘Truth’, and with the architectural drawing in its speculative and timeless dimension. Authorial verisimilitude is hence achieved through physical and digital model making, rendering (synthèse) and manipulation.
The exhibition, curated by Filippo Fanciotti,  displays the re-edited studies carried out by the LAPIS Laboratory between 2016 and 2023 in a series of allegorical diptychs laid out in thematic rooms. The left panel is a Reconstruction of the original painting questioning the true essence of the reality represented, exposing perspective corrections, omissions or other choices made by painters to bend all physical and optical phenomena to their own advantage in order to fine-tune their visual narratives. The right panel is a Deconstruction work which in conversation with the Reconstruction, performs variations on the technical elements that characterize it.
Exploring the relationship between interiors and exteriors, LAPIS discourse takes on the Baconian paradigm that knowledge passes through representation by converting the architectural envelope into a scenic machine. A device that questions the domestic, the everyday, the banal, and addresses the narrative role assumed by spatial sequences.
The unprecedented vision that emerges from the images in the exhibition, finally deprived of human presence, offers architecture the opportunity to laconically speak about itself as the narrator and main protagonist, laying itself bare in all its beautiful ordinariness and reaffirming its presence to a public that had mostly ignored it.