- ROMA, 04 GEN - An Italian artist has dotted Rome with
images of a black pope in his fresh satirical attacks on the
papacy and the Roman Catholic Church's ruling bodies.
"Habemus Papam, nero!" ("We have a black Pope!") is the artistic
cry launched in Rome by the innovative work of the artist Pep
Marchegiani, who is part of a long tradition of satire against
Popes and the Roman curia, with his image of a new African Pope
(Celestine VI) over the famous statue of Pasquino, along the
Tiber river in front of the Cupolone (St Peter's Dome).
The image is scattered around in other iconic locations of the
eternal city, for example at the feet of the statue of Giordano
Bruno in Campo de' Fiori.
Marchegiani, an artist who is not new to provocative art and to
raising discussion around the role of contemporary art, wanted
to bring to the heart of Christianity the story of the first
African Pope in history. What inspired him was a dream, when
then materialized in an effigy, an NFT and a website, E-pray
which will sell sacred objects, authorized by the Holy Sea (the
label is being registered) related to the figure of the new
Pope: Celestine VI.
"The idea of the performance - recounts the artist- comes
from a dream, with the spiritual inheritance of Saint Peter's
collected by Celestine VI, the first Pope to come from the area
of Dar Gum'a, in Sudan. An African Pope, with a name that is
evocative of the famous figure of Celestine V, remembered by
Dante, the first Pope to renounce to the Papal seat. After him
Pope Ratzinger, recently passed away, was the next to resign.
Celestine VI, as his ideal predecessor represented by the hermit
of the Great Refusal, is a Pope of the poor, a pure, essential
Church evocative of its origins.
The artist returns to Rome where he already held his first
performance, by placing a hood over the statues at the Pincio,
covering them with black plastic bags, denouncing the capital
city's decadence. Pep Marchegiani, class of 1971, comes from
Abruzzo. He usually works in the realm of contemporary art and
is a fervent supporter of art without masters. In 2021 he signed
a painting "Fat young nameless boy, but with a diaper" which
became the first NFT in the world. The itinerary of Celestine VI
will continue on to other cities.
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