From October 16th, Laure Roynette Gallery has the pleasure to present Italian artist Romina De Novellis' exhibition, together with a short work by one of the most famous representatives of video art: Bill Viola.

The exhibition entilted « To be, or not to be » will present an unprecedented dialogue between two artworks made by Romina De Novellis (FASE REM, a serie of nine recent videos in which the artist performs her dreams of pregnant woman, and AUGURII, the video of a performance realized during the FIAC Outdoors in 2014, in which she is confronted with death surrounded of vultures) and SILENT LIFE, 1979, a historical video of 13 minutes of Bill Viola. This moving portrait of a newborn child in a hospital is part of a larger work, The Reflecting Pool – Collected Work 1977-80.

Romina De Novellis and Bill Viola met each other during a retrospective dedicated to the American video artist last year in the Grand Palais. Laure Roynette had invited Bill Viola to come to discover the work of the performer. This meeting, on Ascension day in the gallery, revealed an intellectual and artistic similarity between the artists, particularly around their common sources of inspiration: the time, the body and especially the work of Masters from the Italian painting such as Caravaggio.

Captivated by anthropology and by the question of the confinement of the human body, which she never ceased to explore, Romina De Novellis realizes physical performances on the body in procession installed in the public space, followed by the look of the passer-by, in which the gesture is central to real alive paintings.

Artist performer born in Naples in 1982, she grew up in Rome and lives today in Paris. After years dedicated to dance and theater (graduated by the method Royal Academy of Dance of London in 1999), she started being interested in the art of performance by subtracting the speaking, the choreography and the stage direction from her artistic to concentrate on an art of gestures in which the body is installed in the urban space.

With a Master of the DAMS of the University Rome 3 in 2008, Romina De Novellis is also PhD to the EHESS of Paris with a thesis in anthropology. Her work was presented in the form of performance in the Palais de Tokyo on the occasion of the dinner of the sponsors and Friends of Palais de Tokyo in 2015, in several Nuit Blanches (2010, 2011, 2012), in the FIAC Outdoors in the Jardin des Plantes (2014), in the Friche Belle de Mai, in the context of Marseille, Cultural Capital (2013), to the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (for the Nuit des Musées in 2013), and in the Venice Biennale within the framework of the events of the Opening Week in 2011 and 2013.

FASE REM (Rapid Eye Movement Sleep), the installation which presents Romina De Novellis includes “nine videos, reminding the nine months needed by human beings to form intra uterus and come to life: get out and live the real life”. “I dreamed about all the images of this video installation, FASE REM. So, I performed each dream with a small team of collaborators who contributed to the realization of shots and photos… FASE REM it is not the artistic performance of my dreams, it is the true life of what I have dreamed about. It is an endangerment of my body and of my unconscious which went out every time I lived again my dream by not being any more in phase of REM sleep, but in performative phase".