Bar Far is an installation and a working bar by Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page and presented in Villa Lontana’s new space in Trastevere. Renovated in collaboration with Studio Strato, this new location extends Villa Lontana’s ongoing commitment to exploring the intersections between ancient and contemporary practices.
Like our dreams, Bar Far is a condensation of paradoxical layers. Echoes of ancient Roman and baroque lavishness mingle with contemporary architectural austerity, and flashes of colour that seem to come from the future. The effect is an environment that is at once church and tomb, prophecy and ruin, heaven and hell. Keith-Roach’s plaster cast reliefs dramatise the building itself: body-parts emerge from walls and combine with construction materials—brick, pipe, timber—appearing not only to adorn but also to build Bar Far, like infrastructural Caryatids. Page’s wall painting turns the final room into an illusory colonnade or cloister— though one that surveys not a heavenly landscape but an ominous infinity that draws us in with an ambiguous, otherworldly glow.