PADUA, ITALY.- Perugi artecontemporanea presents The Royal Art Lodge Pensieri dei serpenti, A show with Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, curated by Guido Bartorelli. The Royal Art Lodge is a tightly knit group of three Canadian artists: Marcel Dzama, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber.

All three have achieved success as individual artists with substantial international recognition, but every Wednesday they meet in the same studio to work together. After years working with drawing and video - the group was formed in Winnipeg in 1996, originally with five members- the Royal Art Lodge has now moved onto the most ''sanctified'' of all the techniques of the visual arts: painting.

''Pensieri dei serpenti'' is the second solo show at the galleria Perugi in Padua following the first in 2002. The exhibition presents a series of eighty small paintings on panels. Each work is the result of the contribution of all three artists and has been undertaken in an atmosphere of absolute freedom of association, with no concern for going beyond the limits of weirdness and absurdity.

Nonetheless we can recognise recurrent elements: many paintings present a single subject: often a young woman or a child, less often a man. Around them it is as if their indecipherable stream of conscience was materialising, which shows us a parade of strange creatures such as monsters and animals as if from fairy tales, but from sad tales, from those which make us cry at the end. The powerful archetype of death is one theme which stands out, but treated with the melancholic humour which has always characterised the Royal Art Lodge.