The three chimeras of Amitai Romm

Amitai Romm was born in Jerusalem in 1985 and currently lives and works in Denmark. His artistic research revolves around hybridization between nature and the artifices of technology, mediated by science. Therefore, being the research strained between plant life and sensors, data collection processes speculate on the perception of this clash-encounter.
In his first exhibition in Florence, held two years ago at the Veda Gallery, Romm installed a small suction pump, connected to a PVC foil placed at the center of the gallery, on display, facing the street. The vacuum between the two surfaces held still, hanging in the air, an etrog (citron) grew with Mehadrin Kashrut process and brought in directly from Calabria, inside a wrapping without space nor air. In that intersection, resembling a hospital device, components were subject to a tension: what is shown meets the eye.
In the new ongoing exhibition titled Graft, in the wide space of the Veda gallery until March 25th, that has since moved from the old town to the citadel of culture to the former Manifattura Tabacchi, Ami installs, hangs on the walls of the room suggestive works that challenge the public to interpret it in their own way. But the organic component doesn’t disappear, and it is instead present in the exhibition through the “technological suggestion” of a spinal column that can be found in the three works on display.
The anthropomorphic reference is also evident in the two added side lobes, which are at the same time reminiscent of a satellite dish able to pick up return waves. Up close one can discover the matrix of the “shield” – made of a mesh, a 3D-printed cage – which contains a vegetable substratum of the forest meticulously collected by the artist, squeezed into that mesh.
Technology and nature again complete each other by acquiring the same features of what in another work – with the same shape but made of copper sheet – is polished as if it were a precious piece of jewelry.
In Florence, the city that hosts the Chimera of Arezzo, Amitai Romm’s three chimeras gain in suggestion for their unfailing connection to the fantastic that can’t be trivially confined to the illusory. In the exhibition the three sculptures are accompanied by some small works on paper, created through the medium of photography, put there to be meditated upon, one by one, closely. Beside their own value, as a whole they serve as a “pause”, as a moment of introversion of thoughts.

David Palterer

Translated by Laura Cattani and revised by Margherita Francese students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.