Shafei Xia's Picaresque Watercolors at Francesca Antonini, Rome

Shafei Xia, born in Shaoxing in 1989 and based in Bologna, is the first artist in a new series of focus exhibitions at Francesca Antonini gallery in Rome, dedicated to artists outside the gallery's stable. The series is conceived as a lateral and 'light' format that could unleash unexpected energies. Xia's exhibition features six medium-to-large watercolors on stretched sandalwood paper, a support that lends a surprisingly cave-like atmosphere to fantasies blending Sadean and Fellinian, circus-like and 18th-century elements. The works are picaresque, joyful, and unrestrained, only superficially classifiable as illustrative. They teem with activity yet remain archetypal, irrational, and anti-narrative, refreshing the archaic intertwining of the erotic and symbolic with a cheerfully cynical and prosaic vein.