BUSTS, MATEAS PARES
Fermo, Small Roman Cisterns
September 6 – September 30, 2025
Opening: Saturday, September 6 at 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Small Roman Cisterns of Fermo, Largo Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti
Dates: September 6–30, 2025
Admission: free
The Small Roman Cisterns in Fermo will host BUSTS, the solo exhibition of Swedish artist Mateas Pares, from September 6 to 30, 2025. Pares is internationally recognized for his unique sculptural language, which merges tradition with experimentation.
The opening will take place on Saturday, September 6 at 7:00 p.m.
The exhibition presents four new works created specifically for the occasion and is curated by independent curators Lorenzo Ilari and Ludovica Cancellieri.
The Small Roman Cisterns were once part of the city’s ancient water supply network, connected to the larger cistern complex of Fermo. With the decline of Roman rule, they fell into disuse and were forgotten for centuries. Today, their remains are a site of historical and cultural interest: a fragment of infrastructure once vital to daily life, now preserved as cultural testimony.
The title of the exhibition, BUSTS, recalls the widespread practice in ancient Rome of creating busts to honor prominent figures, immortalizing their image in matter. Through his sculptural practice—where the painter’s canvas becomes plastic material—Mateas Pares reinterprets the bust in a state of disorder, erosion, and disintegration, inviting reflection on the pressures exerted by functionality as a means of belonging and acceptance.
“If once the cisterns collected water, today they collect memory.
Like Pares’s sculptures, they offer themselves to time, to change, to chance.
If their role has vanished, what remains is a silent yet tenacious testimony to transformation.
The loss of a purpose is not necessarily an end; it can be a liberation. Pares’s figures invite us to embrace this plasticity of being—to recognize, in change, not a cancellation, but a revolution. And so, who are we?
We are the unstable matter of becoming.”
— from the curatorial text by Lorenzo Ilari and Ludovica Cancellieri
The event is sponsored and supported by the Municipality of Fermo, under the patronage of the Embassy of Sweden in Rome, and in collaboration with the Giampaolo Abbondio Gallery and the cultural association Koiné.
The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of local businesses. Special thanks go to Ground Floorings, as main sponsor, and to Giano, Il Bruno Bio, Lorella Parrucchieria, 3F Elettronica, Richard’s BBQ, Chalet La Papalina, and Polpette & Pampero for their valuable contributions.
Venue: Small Roman Cisterns of Fermo, Largo Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti
Dates: September 6–30, 2025
Admission: free
Opening hours:
Monday to Saturday: 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.
Sunday: 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE – MATEAS PARES
Mateas Pares studied graphic design and commercial arts at Beckmans College of Design and at Bergh’s in Stockholm, earning major international awards such as the Cannes Grand Prix and the Epica d’Or.
Since 2012 he has devoted himself entirely to his artistic practice, and since 2020 he has directed and curated the exhibition project StudyForArtPlatform in Stockholm.
Driven on one hand by a desire to paint and on the other by a natural inclination toward sculpture, his artistic research focuses on questions related to living within the boundaries of the body that belongs to us.
By combining sculptural materials with canvas, the artist has developed his own painterly language, born out of his being a sculptor: a dialogue of tension and coexistence, where canvas and sculpture sustain and oppose each other, moving between abstraction and figuration, in a state with no resolution.
Pares’s works have been exhibited in prestigious international venues, including Galleri Golsa (Norway), Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio (Italy), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (Sweden), and the National Gallery (Bosnia and Herzegovina), as well as in numerous other exhibition spaces. His works are also held in significant private collections.