Roman ruins might not be the obvious inspiration for a drinking establishment, but that is exactly what underpins Bar Far. This watering hole-cum-art installation in the Eternal City is the brainchild of sculptor Clementine Keith-Roach and painter Christopher Page, who are partners in life and long-time collaborators.
The invitation came from Vittoria Bonifati, the founder of the non-profit space Villa Lontana. She was on the lookout for an impactful way to launch the organisation’s new outpost in Trastevere, and settled on this unusual proposition as it was still being built. ‘We were installing the reliefs and painting the walls when the plasterers were still finishing their work,’ says Page, ‘Bar Far emerged out of nothing.’
These unorthodox beginnings are fitting for a work that is tinged with the language of ancient architecture and excavation. The clay-coloured interior looks as though it has been fashioned from a mud plain, and Keith-Roach’s haunting plaster casts could have been pulled from the collapsed remnants of a Greco-Roman temple. Page’s murals, too, are coded with the strangely isolated language of the metaphysical Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose depictions of bizarre, psychologically charged palazzos greatly informed the Surrealists.
Naturally, the city itself played its part. ‘Rome puts you in a lot of different places at once and many worlds are visible,’ says Keith-Roach. ‘It’s a place where sculpture, painting and architecture have been fused in really crazy, hallucinatory ways. It can feel quite apocalyptic.’ She references the Italian term spolia meaning stones and artefacts repurposed to build new structures, and found that the city’s San Clemente basilica was a key inspiration.
This incredible structure is built on the foundations of a first-century mithraeum and possibly an even earlier pagan site. It is filled with recycled architectural fragments and statuary, all layered on top of each other among various forms of ancient rubble. Keith-Roach’s dismembered reliefs share an easy affinity, with limbs extending from the walls, clutching each other or else connecting to more industrial structures such as bricks, waste pipes and chains, like some kind of classical Frankenstein’s laboratory.
This language of vaguely hellish ancient strata carries through in Page’s eerie trompe l’oeil murals, where a molten red emerges from precisely articulated archways and vignettes. It puts one in mind of lava, as if this installation has descended deep into the core of the earth and is surrounded by an unknowable landscape.
The artists are keen to point out that this is all a fully functioning bar, as opposed to a form of static scenography. The public is welcomed by a neon sign that alludes to the nightlife signage littered across Roman establishments, and visitors can enjoy a selection of choice suitably blood-coloured vermouth-based beverages during opening hours (the lights are dimmed at about 6pm, and an array of candles lit). In fact, Keith-Roach and Page are putting in their own bartending shifts and hope to embody the surlier demeanour of infamous purveyors such as Muriel Belcher, whose Soho Colony Room was frequented by the likes of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Bars are usually considered spaces of conviviality, where one socialises and makes merry, but there are more melancholy tinges to this work. A few high stools are accompanied by a couple of demure leaning tables that feature unsettling pairs of human legs beneath. These are the only nods to rest and relaxation. Instead, the artists wanted to play with darker associations, where one might get lost at the bottom of a bottle and experience something more transient and isolating.
There are also elements of the liminal coding seen across cinema, art and pop culture (think Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks or the Twin Peaks Road House), where a bar becomes something akin to purgatory, offering uneasy passage between the living and the dead, or, indeed, the supernatural. ‘We see this as an aesthetic investigation into worlds ending and worlds beginning,’ says Keith-Roach. ‘Everything is built from broken fragments – there’s a lure and a horror in that.’
Bar Far is on view until 20 March at Villa Lontana, Via Garibaldi 68-69, 00153 Rome. For more information visit villalontana.it
