Bar Far is an installation and a working bar by Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page and presented in Villa Lontana’s new space in Trastevere. Renovated in collaboration with Studio Strato, this new location extends Villa Lontana’s ongoing commitment to exploring the intersections between ancient and contemporary practices.

Keith-Roach, a sculptor of new ruins, and Page, a painter of light, have animated the architecture of this newly renovated interior, creating a hallucinatory gesamtkunstwerk in the vein of ancient and baroque Rome. Bar Far is both an artwork and a bar that draws inspiration from the art-bars of the past: Cabaret Voltaire, the Colony Room and Giorgio de Chirico’s favourite, Caffè Greco in Rome. Places like these often emerged during times of political upheaval and provided refuge for experiment and conversation.

Like our dreams, Bar Far is a condensation of paradoxical layers. Echoes of ancient Roman and baroque lavishness mingle with contemporary architectural austerity, and flashes of colour that seem to come from the future. The effect is an environment that is at once church and tomb, prophecy and ruin, heaven and hell. Keith-Roach’s plaster cast reliefs dramatise the building itself: body-parts emerge from walls and combine with construction materials—brick, pipe, timber—appearing not only to adorn but also to build Bar Far, like infrastructural Caryatids. Page’s wall painting turns the final room into an illusory colonnade or cloister— though one that surveys not a heavenly landscape but an ominous infinity that draws us in with an ambiguous, otherworldly glow.

Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984, London) is a sculptor of new ruins. Drawing on historical typologies of sculpture, human gesture, and material cultures around birth and death, her work explores the tension between the archaeological and the contemporary. Her practice is centered around plaster casting. Body casts are merged with antique vessels and occasionally sculpted into architectural space, Keith-Roach then trompe-l’oeil paints these new assemblages creating continuous surfaces that blur the boundaries between body and object, skin and matter. Keith-Roach’s work has been exhibited internationally. Her work was recently included in Holes, Clifford Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY (2025); Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2023); Milk, Wellcome Collection, London, UK (2023); and Slip Tease, Kasmin, New York (2023). She has previously exhibited at Centre Regional D’art Contemporain (CRAC), Sète, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Storefront, Los Angeles. Keith-Roach is represented by Ben Hunter, London and P·P·O·W, New York. She is an editor of Effects journal.

Christopher Page (b. 1984, London) is a painter of light, shadow and reflection. He makes  trompe l’oeil  paintings that confuse the boundaries between real and virtual space. Paintings of framed paintings with shadows cast across their surfaces call into question where the work begins and ends; mirrors that don't reflect us back confront us with our own absence; glowing skies distort architectural space. Page’s work has been exhibited internationally. His work was recently included in Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2023); Present Tense, Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK (2024); and The Desk, Blue Projects, London, UK (2025). He has previously exhibited at Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), Rio de Janeiro, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Storefront, Los Angeles. Page is represented by Ben Hunter, London. He is a founding editor of Effects journal.