The exhibition is developed in the context of “Cabine d’Artista”, a project created in the past years by Alessandra Borzacchini in Ostia, at the historic Sporting Beach bathing establishment, which at the end of the summer season makes its spaces available for this unprecedented cultural project. The Sporting Beach was built for the 1960 Rome Olympics as a completion of the Via Cristoforo Colombo terminal; in the legendary 1960s the bathing establishment affirmed itself and achieved notoriety, hosting great actors, directors and singers as well as the most famous international stars, politicians, captains of industry. Season after season the years of the Sporting Beach accompanied the transformation and changes of Rome, presenting itself as an interpreter of the changes in society. The link with the world of culture is proposed again today through the presence of 35 artists, representatives of the new artistic vigor that is investing the capital. The artists, many of them afferent to the increasingly widespread run spaces in Rome, have been asked to intervene individually within a booth of the Balenare establishment that will be assigned to them, giving a personal reading of the space and place in which they will intervene; they represent a new springtime for the national art scene.
A cabin that was interpreted antelitteram by the Roman master Giorgio de Chirico with the Bagni Misteriosi cycle of works, from which the project takes its cue. Bagni Misteriosi is a tribute to the painter of Metaphysics; in fact, de Chirico not only produced the bathing-themed series, but spent much of his summer time on the Roman coast, owning a house in Ostia.

The theme of Giorgio De Chirico’s Mysterious Baths encompasses a number of works including the monumental fountain designed for the Milan Triennale in 1973, and has long been present in the master’s artistic research: in fact, the iconography originated in 1934, with the lithographs he executed to illustrate Jean Cocteau’s Mythologie. It is de Chirico himself who provides us with indications of the birth of the subject; at the inauguration of the fountain at the Triennale, in fact, the artist explains how the idea for the mysterious baths came to him in a house where the floor had been highly polished with wax. “I looked at a gentleman walking in front of me,” the painter recounts, “and whose legs reflected in the floor. I had the impression that he could sink into that floor, like into a pool, that he could move and even swim there. So I imagined strange pools with men immersed in that kind of water-parquet, standing still, and moving, and sometimes stopping to converse with other men who stood outside the floor pool.” Smartly dressed men, bathers, colorful cabins on stilts, resplendent pools, and water canals come together in an ideal set of scenes and moments that immerse the viewer in a timeless and unreal dimension steeped in mystery and anticipation. These works are born of enigma and light and develop over time through matter.