Bar Far turns Villa Lontana Trastevere into a working bar installation
Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page’s Bar Far is an installation and a working bar presented at Villa Lontana’s new space in Trastevere, Rome, running from 4 December 2025 to 14 March 2026. Shown inside a newly renovated interior developed in collaboration with Studio Strato, the project turns the venue’s architecture into an immersive, room-by-room artwork that invites visitors to drink, talk, and linger while moving through shifting illusions and references to the city’s ancient and baroque atmospheres.
Bar Far takes its name from Villa Lontana—“Faraway Villa”—whose headquarters sit north of Rome, historically beyond the city walls. By opening deeper inside the city, Villa Lontana reframes distance as something psychological: Bar Far suggests an ambiguous elsewhere assembled through surfaces that look stable from afar and unravel up close. Keith-Roach, a sculptor, and Page, a painter, approach the site as a total artwork, animating the renovated shell with trompe l’oeil strategies that make the building feel at once structural and performative.
The project includes a functioning bar environment integrated with sculptural plaster reliefs, construction materials such as brick, pipe and timber, and a perspectival wall painting that transforms the final room into an illusory colonnade-like space. In Bar Far, Clementine Keith-Roach’s plaster cast reliefs appear to grow from the walls as partial bodies and architectural fragments, acting like infrastructural figures that seem to hold up the interior while also interrupting it. Their physicality is undercut by finish and paint: what reads as stone-like mass reveals itself as painted plaster when viewed closely.
Christopher Page’s contribution intensifies this instability. His wall painting introduces depth and architectural order, then disrupts it as the viewer changes position, producing a space that looks convincing from one angle and distorts from another. The installation relies on this friction between the built room and the images laid onto it, asking visitors to track what is surface, what is support, and what is pure suggestion.
As an installation, Bar Far draws on the lineage of art-bars and cultural meeting places—Cabaret Voltaire, the Colony Room, and Rome’s Caffè Greco—where conversation, experiment, and refuge often formed in tense historical moments. Here, the typology of the bar becomes a social instrument as much as an artwork format, extending Villa Lontana’s programme at the intersection of contemporary studio practice and older visual languages.
Bar Far is curated by Vittoria Bonifati and will be activated by live performances beginning on 4 December and continuing through the exhibition, with early contributions by poet Florence Uniacke, artist and soprano Nyla van Ingen, and musician Lukas De Clerck. Across its duration, Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page’s Bar Far positions illusion not as decoration, but as a method for looking harder—at materials, at architecture, and at the ways a room can host both image and encounter.
Photography by Jasper Fry, with courtesy of Villa Lontana
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