ARTISTS Alessandro Valeri

The Circus

In the late 1990s, the Roman artist Alessandro Valeri approached the world of the circus not as a distant observer, but as someone willing to enter and share the life of that fragile and nomadic community. In 1999 he joined the tour of the Circo Togni, spending more than a month travelling and living under the big top alongside the performers, experiencing their daily rhythms far from the spectacle and the lights of the stage.

From this immersion emerged the series The Circus, a body of works developed from photographs taken during that period. Valeri was not searching for the spectacular image of the acrobat or the clown, but rather for the quiet humanity that inhabits the backstage: moments of waiting, simple gestures, suspended gazes balanced between dream and fatigue. His images become a kind of visual diary, a sequence of emotional fragments that reveal the most intimate and vulnerable side of circus life.

Often printed on canvas in black and white, the photographs were later intervened by the artist with hand-applied acrylic paint. Through this pictorial gesture, the photographic surface is altered, creating a tension between documentation and memory, between reality and a more dreamlike dimension. The brushstrokes introduce a poetic and sometimes unsettling layer that transforms each image into a unique work, positioned somewhere between photography and painting.

The result is a visual narrative that presents the circus as a symbolic and profoundly human place, suspended between wonder and melancholy. Through a discreet and empathetic gaze, Valeri captures the essence of a world often romanticized, revealing instead its deeper layers: the vulnerability of its performers, the poetry of their gestures, and the archetypal dimension of a universe that seems to exist outside of time.

NOTE: The following critical text by Giorgio Calcara was written on the occasion of the exhibition Nella mente del maestro in Modena, dedicated to Salvador Dalí. Within the exhibition, a special section presented a parallel dialogue between Dalí’s works inspired by the world of the circus and the series Circus by the Roman artist Alessandro Valeri.