From February 19 to April 21, 2025, Pavilion 9b of the Rome Mattatoio will host the exhibition Felice Levini. Progettare il Caos, promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in collaboration with AA+ (Association for Art and More).
The exhibition, curated by Massimo Belli, presents a conspicuous portion of the neatly chaotic macrocosm that has always distinguished the work of Felice Levini (Rome, 1956), and his ironic reading of the world-system. Canvases, papers, installations, and sculptures alternate seamlessly, immortalizing contemporaneity with pungent elegance.
The exhibition recounts over thirty years of work by Felice Levini, an artist who is both eclectic and orthodox; but that is not all.
Progettare il Caos (Designing Chaos) manifests the utopian design desire to bring order to the disorder par excellence: Chaos. Going back to the Greek etymology of this term, which expresses an opening – that which is ‘wide open’ – one realizes that the title itself is a calembour, a no-sense that recounts the empty race of the contemporary world, constantly frustrated by the impossibility of narrating itself in an orderly manner, by categories.
The exhibition takes its title from two very long eponymous works in felt-tip pen on paper (Progettare il Caos II/III, 2022-24) in which the artist develops, without solution of continuity, iconic images of the last century of human history, ironically juxtaposed sometimes by antinomy and sometimes by analogy. Painstakingly realized with the tip of a felt-tip pen, these images trace the crooked trajectory of modern man and his often-fallen myths. The two works, therefore, become the summa of the artist’s iconographic baggage, with them it becomes possible to decipher the entire body of the exhibited works, created from the 1980s to the present day.
Confused by the chaos of the earth, we are not saved even by raising our eyes to the sky: between paratroopers who become angels, battleships and animals, satyrs and dancers, navigators and singers, we can perhaps realize that we have long since lost the reins of what we are.
Mattatoio di Roma
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4 – Roma
Padiglione 9b
