ROME.- The exhibition Day for Night: New American Realism presents more than 150 works from the Aïshti Foundation’s collection of contemporary art, one of the most interesting institutions on the international scene. Launched twenty-five years ago by Italian-Lebanese businessman Tony Salamé, this foundation has become a truly dynamic force for art in the Middle East. At its vast headquarters in Beirut – designed in 2015 by David Adjaye Architects – it regularly presents major thematic exhibitions and important solo shows by some of the most influential artists of our time, while through its support for other institutions, the foundation works with cutting-edge curators and museums around the world.

The exhibition borrows its title from a work by New York artist Lorna Simpson, but also refers to a film technique. “Day for night” is a cinematic trick that makes it possible to shoot night scenes in broad daylight. The term was made famous by a 1973 François Truffaut film with the same title; in French, day for night is known as nuit américaine, “American night” – an image well suited to the chiaroscuro visions of these artists, who, over the last few decades, have worked to capture the reality of the United States in all of its complexity.

Presented in the extraordinary setting of Palazzo Barberini, Day for Night: New American Realism is a unique opportunity to explore a cross-section of contemporary American art. The exhibition focuses above all on the work of artists who tackle the crucial question of realism and the representation of truth. Taking an intergenerational approach, Day for Night includes pieces by emerging artists who are experimenting with new approaches to figurative art, presented alongside the work of important predecessors who set the scene for many heated debates about verism and representation.

The gradual erosion of the concept of truth that has characterized American culture in recent years has paradoxically coincided with a return to figuration by many contemporary artists. While concepts such as “alternative facts” and “post-truths” have gained ground in American public opinion, many artists have embarked on a complex investigation of what realism means, especially in the realm of contemporary painting.
This exploration of realism finds a strikingly original setting in the galleries of Palazzo Barberini, which hold the world’s largest collection of Caravaggisti. These artists, drawn to Rome from across Europe in the early seventeenth century, built on Caravaggio’s revolutionary vision to introduce a new, naturalistic depiction of reality, sparking what could be considered, to use an anachronism, the first art movement of international scope.

The exhibition unfolds across three floors of Palazzo Barberini, beginning in the twelve rooms of the ground-floor exhibition area and continuing through some of the museum’s most emblematic spaces, including several monumental rooms on the piano nobile – the Bernini Atrium, the Oval Room, the Marble Room, and the Borromini Atrium – to conclude on the floor above in the Appartamento Settecentesco. This Rococo interior, the only one of its kind in Rome, will be regularly open to the public for the first time during this exhibition.

Amid dramatic Baroque spaces and eccentric eighteenth-century decor, with works from one of the most important collections of our time, Day for Night introduces visitors to the latest developments in American art. They are presented alongside the architecture and collections of Palazzo Barberini, in a rich exploration of the many ties – from the seventeenth century to the present – that have woven together power, spectacle, and the representation of reality.

The Revolution of Caravaggism at Palazzo Barberini

Palazzo Barberini is the birthplace of the Baroque: that extraordinary propaganda device and engine of artistic innovation deployed by Urban VIII, who was the mind behind this architectural tour de force. During his long papacy (1623-1644), when Rome was the epicenter of the Catholic world and a magnet for all artists and intellectuals from across Europe, Palazzo Barberini was its main court, presided over by three of Urban’s nephews, who were omnivorous collectors, patrons of the arts and sciences, organizers of colossal theatrical productions, and cynical, greedy men of power. As they said at the time: Quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini, what the barbarians didn’t do, the Barberini did.

As extraordinarily rich parvenus, the Barberinis built their social standing by making novelty a value unto itself. It was a completely new outlook, and this palace is its greatest manifestation: a building with no precedents or imitations. This is where Baroque space was invented, a continuum between real and painted space, between concrete experience and the imaginary dimension, a factory of persuasion where the machine of Catholic propaganda was fine-tuned. For that matter, in the eyes of contemporaries, theatricality was the palazzo’s salient feature: visible from much of the city, it is itself a stage and spectacle.

The extraordinary treasure trove assembled by the pope’s nephews – thousands of paintings, antiquities, books, musical and scientific instruments, exotic plants, and even a lion – has mostly been lost, but the works on view in the building are perfectly reflective of the history of Palazzo Barberini. At the core of the collection are several extraor- dinary paintings by Caravaggio, including Judith Beheading Holofernes, and about a hundred works by his followers, painted in Rome between 1600 and 1630. This is the richest selection of Caravaggisti in the world, allowing us to grasp the epoch-making scope of Caravaggio’s revolution: the approach of “working from nature”; the sharp contrasts of chiaroscuro used in close-up compositions; the inclusion of lower-class figures in paintings with historical or religious themes, transposed into a contemporary setting; the recurring themes such as concerts, genre scenes, allegories of human life; and lastly, the international nature of the phenomenon, all of which were elements that made Caravaggism the first artistic “movement” in modern Europe.
It was a revolution that granted visibility to people who had never been center-stage before, and established an unprecedented relationship between viewer and work, both emotional and intellectual. It is no coincidence that the explosion of naturalist painting took place parallel to the spread of the experimentation-based method that ushered in the scientific revolution of the early seventeenth century. These paintings by followers of Caravaggio also illustrate another dawning phenomenon that was just as revolutionary: the rise in Rome of a generation of collectors who fostered a new way of writing about, looking at, and trading in art. Picture galleries became common, and writers began to take the perspective of the collector, of the person observing the works. It marked the invention of art criticism, which came into being with the Le Considerazioni sulla pittura by Giulio Mancini, Urban VIII’s personal physician, analyzed how Caravaggio was interpreted by his followers.

Night-time scenes, light and shadow, the urgent need to depict reality not in imitative but in critical terms: these are traits shared by the interpreters of Caravaggio and by the artists brought together in Day for Night. Likewise, the political use of culture and the pervasiveness of communication and propaganda are still key features of our landscape, just as they were four hundred years ago in the rooms of this palace.

All art is contemporary.