In this blog, Juan Bolivar —UAL Rome Research Fellow at the BSR from September to December 2025—shares reflections on his residency experience and the research he will present at the December 2025 Winter Open Studios.
As part of my research I have been thinking about the social setting of fresco paintings with special focus on case studies such as Livia’s Garden, House of Augustus and St Ignatius Room in Rome, and the Room of Mysteries and House of the Orchards in Pompeii.
These encounters are slowly coalescing into outputs and ideas for future projects. My overall experience at the British School at Rome has been magical, sometimes in the literal sense with a serendipity of coincidences and discoveries along the way. I have been thinking about the use of colour, perspective and illusion in the interior space of frescoes but also the (less visible) surrounding objects, music and lighting of rooms with special attention to ‘lucernes’ or oil lamps.
In my practice I bring together disparate contexts for viewing and interpretation of painting. As a South American-born artist I am deeply influenced by Latin American Geometric Abstraction. Translocating to the UK in the 1980s heightened my awareness of this movement’s connections to Europe and North America. This enquiry has expanded to explore abstraction’s cross-cultural presence across new territories, from Dansaekhwa Korean monochromes, cinema, popular culture and now fresco painting.
The experience as a BSR fellow has been unique and transformative actively and tacitly encouraging new conversations through planned and chance encounters so in addition to writing, painting, film and photography I have been learning to play the bass guitar and had a singing lesson with an opera singer. These activities echo and inform writing I have been working on about a travelling musician through whom I witness frescoes in Rome and Pompeii. There is a folding and looping of time echoed in panoramic photographs and in low resolution black and white polaroid photographs I have been taking, with imagery and textures suggesting this idea of memory and time travel.
I have had the opportunity to visit the ancient city of Pompeii to see frescoes made using a highly sophisticated visual and material language. My interest here is how the frescoes formed part of a larger intermedial and social experience and operated as an unfolding space where images and patterns on walls acted as extensions of the interiors they were set within. This has led to research into how frescoes in Pompeiian painting communicated ideas of social status through a series of language games and visual clues and their evolution through the four styles of Pompeiian painting which varied in their use of flatness, perspective, insertion of pictures within pictures and decoration. These frescoes were executed by organised painting teams of artists and when completed they were accompanied by social activities interactions and entertainment; lit by oil lamps they created flickering shadows further animating these scenes.
Having met and spoken to scholars, visual artists and academics here in Rome my ambition is to bring these explorations to a new stage for contemplation, magic realism and exploring painting’s social setting. In addition to an exhibition exploring the idea of a ‘total experience’, I am thinking how different perspectives can be brought together in a conference and possibly a book around the idea of the social setting of frescoes: from murals and wall painting to music, food and use of lighting. I am also interested in the idea of re-enactment and I hope this project can initiate a conversation with other institutions such as the Kelsey Museum, Michigan University who have as part of their collection a life size copy of Pompeii’s Room of Mysteries, painted in the 1920s, exhibited in Rome and later kept at the Kelsey where it has been ever since. In March next year I will be speaking at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Londra, sharing some of my experiences at BSR and plans for future research, artworks and collaborations.
