PAINTERS SOMETIMES do not expect a lot of the gallery where they show their work. Will the guy display the stuff correctly? Will he/she manage to sell any of the work? However, not many artists will have had the problems with their gallery owner that have befallen Irish painter Michelle Rogers.
She was showing her work earlier this year in the swanky Aequalias gallery in Rome’s central Via Margutta, owned by Massimo Micucci.
Micucci is now in prison as he is a business associate of Silvio Scaglia, the Italian telecoms entrepreneur under investigation for his alleged role in a money-laundering and tax-fraud scheme involving the telecommunications operator, Fastweb, founded by him in 1999.
As part of the investigation, police have seized assets and property belonging to the gallery owner. However, in their wisdom, police sequestered not just the gallery but also its contents, including no fewer than 17 of Rogers’s paintings. They argued that since they were in the gallery and might have been sold by Micucci, they could be considered as partly his “property”.
For Rogers, this has proved to be a serious problem since the 17 paintings include some of her major works, representing four years of artistic effort.
Although both her own lawyer and the Irish Embassy in Rome have worked hard to persuade different courts the paintings should be released, nothing has thus far moved in her favour in the notoriously Byzantine and slow Italian legal system.
Invited to show her work in Basel last month and due to hold an exhibition in Claremorris next month, Rogers has had to paint up a storm to replace the sequestered works. Needless to say, she is worried there seems to be no end in sight to her Kafkaesque situation: “Not only are four years of my work inaccessible for exhibitions and sales . . . there is also the worry. I’ve heard horror stories about similar cases where art work was returned damaged after years of legal limbo.”
Rogers can take little comfort from reports earlier this month indicating the Fastweb investigation is, at best, months away from even filing formal charges. Prosecutors had hoped to wrap up the initial part of the investigation by the end of last month but, since beginning in February, the case has expanded to include more than 80 suspects, allegedly linked in some way to the money-laundering and tax-fraud scam.