A Bar That Is Not Quite a Bar
Rome has never lacked for spaces where art and social life overlap, but Bar Far proposes a more radical fusion. It is not a bar that happens to show art, nor an exhibition that happens to serve drinks. It is a sculptural environment that temporarily adopts the behaviors of a bar. The act of gathering becomes part of the artwork, and the artwork becomes inseparable from the act of gathering.
Installed within Villa Lontana, Bar Far reimagines the gallery not as a container for objects but as a participant in a living system. Tables, benches, walls, and frames all function simultaneously as sculpture and infrastructure. Visitors do not merely observe the exhibition. They inhabit it.
This inversion of roles — where the space is the artwork and the audience is its medium — situates Bar Far within a lineage of experimental environments that collapse distinctions between architecture, performance, and sculpture.
The Name as Conceptual Orientation
The title Bar Far is not just wordplay. It operates as a conceptual map. Villa Lontana translates to “faraway villa,” and Bar Far extends that sense of distance into psychological and metaphysical territory. The space feels removed from everyday logic, suspended somewhere between historical reference and speculative fiction.
The “far” in Bar Far does not describe physical location. It describes a state of mind. It signals that what unfolds inside will not conform to ordinary categories. The bar is far from conventional. The gallery is far from neutral. The experience is far from passive.
In this sense, the name functions as a threshold. It prepares the visitor not for entertainment, but for displacement.
Art Bars as Cultural Precedent
Bar Far draws explicitly from the history of art bars as sites of cultural fermentation. Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich gave rise to Dada. Caffè Greco in Rome hosted generations of artists, writers, and philosophers. These spaces mattered not because of their design, but because of what they enabled: conversation, friction, and intellectual risk.
Keith-Roach and Page do not attempt to recreate those spaces. They reinterpret their logic. Bar Far does not invite bohemian nostalgia. It invites contemporary participation in the same cultural mechanism: the use of social space as an engine for thought.
The result is not a homage but a continuation.
Clementine Keith-Roach: The Body as Architecture
Keith-Roach’s practice has long centered on the body as both subject and material. Her sculptural language uses plaster and terracotta to create forms that feel excavated rather than constructed. Limbs emerge from surfaces. Vessels resemble torsos. Objects appear as if they have been unearthed rather than made.
In Bar Far, this vocabulary becomes architectural. Arms and legs curve into tables and benches. Hands become sconces holding candles. Anatomy ceases to represent the body and begins to become it.
This transformation is subtle but profound. It suggests that architecture is not inert. It is an extension of human presence, shaped by and shaping bodies over time. Keith-Roach literalizes this idea, turning architecture into flesh and flesh into architecture.
The effect is intimate and uncanny. Visitors are surrounded not by walls, but by bodies. They sit on them, lean against them, move through them.
Christopher Page: Painting as Portal
Where Keith-Roach grounds the space in material and anatomy, Christopher Page opens it into metaphysical space. His trompe l’œil paintings operate as thresholds rather than images. They look like windows, mirrors, or openings into other worlds.
In Bar Far, these paintings glow in red-orange hues beyond a series of arches that echo Renaissance architecture. The paintings appear to float, creating the illusion that the room itself is suspended.
This visual instability destabilizes spatial logic. The walls do not enclose the space. They dissolve it. The paintings do not decorate the room. They puncture it.
Page’s work introduces the idea that Bar Far is not only a physical environment but a psychological one.
The Coexistence of Temporalities
One of Bar Far’s most striking qualities is its temporal complexity. Ancient Roman references coexist with Baroque excess, modernist austerity, and futuristic color. The space does not belong to any one time.
This temporal layering creates a sensation of simultaneity. The visitor is not located in a historical moment but in a continuum. Past, present, and future bleed into one another.
This effect reinforces the sense that Bar Far is not a place but a condition.
Ritual as Medium
Drinking in Bar Far becomes ritual rather than recreation. The act of holding a glass, sitting at a table, and conversing becomes part of the installation’s choreography.
This ritualization of social behavior transforms visitors into performers. Their movements animate the sculptures. Their presence completes the work.
The exhibition thus operates as a durational performance without actors, scripted only by architecture.
The Space as Philosophical Proposition
Bar Far proposes that space is not neutral. It shapes behavior, perception, and thought. By constructing a space that resists categorization, Keith-Roach and Page invite visitors to question the assumptions embedded in ordinary environments.
Why do bars look the way they do? Why do galleries behave the way they do? Why are these functions separated?
Bar Far does not answer these questions. It suspends them.
Conclusion: A Living Ruin, A Future Memory
Bar Far is a space that feels like a memory before it has happened. It feels ancient and futuristic at once, sacred and profane, intimate and monumental.
It is not an exhibition to be consumed. It is an environment to be entered.
By merging sculpture, architecture, painting, and social ritual, Keith-Roach and Page create a space that does not simply show art but performs it.
Bar Far is not a bar about art. It is art about the idea of a bar, and in that inversion lies its power.
