The exhibition is promoted by Roma Capitale – Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali in collaboration with Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, Fondazione VOLUME! of Rome and Aun Gallery of Teheran. Curated by Bruno Corà, it represents the natural evolution of Bizhan Bassiri’s journey that began in 1984 with his “Manifesto of Magmatic Thought”.

Here we see the artist’s idea of the “Golden Reserve” manifested through the use of papier-mâché, bronze, steel and lava elements. Never straying far from sculptural processes, the artist shapes these diverse materials to reveal “magmatic” thought, a type of thought that informs his entire life and artistic experience. Like a clairvoyant, Bassiri condenses in his work the most authentic meaning of creative force, a concept that he explores in the opening words of his Manifesto: “Being for the first time on the crater, I felt the magmatic condition as if it were blood circulating through my veins and in my brain in its creative state. Since then, I have been the guest of that temple where phantoms take shape and stones resemble enormous animals.”
In that sense, the throbbing of the world transposed by the artist into a creative artistic dimension is reflected in the diverse elements of ‘The Golden Reserve of Magmatic Thought’. In the centre, we see the Dadi della Sorte, flanked by six Serpe auree (Golden Serpents) and a series of gold-plated sculptures with twelve Bastoni battenti, four Leggii and four Erme, while thirty-two Erme covered in sulphur serve as guardians. Standing in the unique space of the ex-Mattatoio on a surface covered with marble dust, which ends at a different blue surface with a large black crystal, the works become a metaphor for man’s relation with the infinite.
Through the interweaving of atavistic relationships between matter/work, work/creation, and creation/the divine, with man standing in the centre, Bassiri reveals the most spiritual sense of a dimension which, though it truly exist, remains veiled by a perpetual sense of mystery. In the end, The Golden Reserve is none other than the essence and most authentic treasure of Magmatic Thought.