Christopher Pelley: Mirabilia Urbis Romae

CHRISTOPHER PELLEY / NEW WORKS
PALAZZO DELFINI, ROMA

Rome = tourists. And long before Frommer's or the Guide Blue, there was the Mirabilia Urbis Romae - the Marvels of the City of Rome. First penned in the 1140's, it remained an immensely popular guide book well into the 15th century. With a writing style "unhampered by any accurate knowledge of the historical continuity of the city", it instead relied on myth, gossip and legend and a considerable amount of inventive fantasy in the description of the monuments of Rome.

I have taken the Mirabilia as a starting point for this exhibition and like some 18th century traveler on the Grand Tour, I have been exploring the monumental, the existential and the ordinary in this Place. The large scale drawings, collages and installations of the exhibition express a piranesian sense of a past and a present that never was, assembled from fragments slightly out of context.. The post-modern tendency to be referential and ironic is balanced by my sense of observation and (subtle) humor. And here, as in the Mirabilia Urbis Romea, the works are less of a descriptive cataloging of the marvels and more of an emotional response to this, the Eternal Jumble.