In Trastevere, Rome, the art center Villa Lontana inaugurates its new location with Bar Far, an installation by Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page that doubles as a bar. A sculptor and a painter united by a shared taste for illusion, Vittoria Bonifati artistic director of Villa Lontana tapped Studio Strato to build their new gallery in Trastevere. The artist duo then transformed it into a space in the lineage of artist hangouts such as Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, the Colony Room in London, and Rome’s Caffè Greco: places where culture was shaped as much by conversation and chance encounters as by formal production.
Villa Lontana’s headquarters are on Via Cassia in northern Rome but their new space is in the heart of the city, in the bustling cobbled streets of Trastevere. Inside, Keith-Roach’s plaster reliefs seem to grow from the walls. Textured fragments of bodies merge with brick, pipe, and timber. Meanwhile, Page’s painted colonnade lures the viewer toward an ominous infinity. Both born in London and now based in the English countryside, the couple brings distinct practices to the collaboration: her plaster-cast sculptures, taken from her own body, collapse skin and architecture into a single tactile surface, while his trompe-l’œil paintings manipulate light and shadow to extend the room beyond its physical limits.
The interior reads as a cohesive whole: Stone benches rise from walls and floors, their supporting arms ending in sculpted hands. Candle holders are built directly into the walls, their form echoing the same muted materiality. Everywhere the eye lands, motifs repeat. The overall effect is immediate, a room that feels carefully designed, yet intimate, inviting visitors to move through and around it, discovering details in the textures, forms, and light that make it both familiar and slightly disorienting.
For Keith-Roach and Page, the project builds on years of collaboration, including “Knots,” 2022, at P·P·O·W in New York and “Earth Sky Body Ruins,” 2023, at Ben Hunter Gallery in London, where Page’s illusionistic architectures were shown in dialogue with Keith-Roach’s forms. Here, the concept extends to the everyday: the bar is both functional and sculptural, and visitors move through the space in ways that mirror the spatial logic of their work. In doing so, the artists explore a long-standing preoccupation with how human interaction, perception, and chance encounters can shape the life of a space, turning what might have been a static exhibition into a living, shared environment. Just imagine a late afternoon at Bar Far: that painted nowhere spilling through the arches, the low murmur of conversation, glasses clinking softly. Nothing in particular is happening, but no one is in a hurry to leave.