CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY OF ART > ALL EXHIBITIONS
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Prof. Carlo Franza,
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illustrious Historian of Contemporary Art of international standing
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Carlo Franza writes: “Photography, a sovereign art, has narrated modernity before and postmodernity today, with shots that have rendered reality solicited by a progress of continuous and visibly elastic sequences, such as the futurist photodynamism of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, a process that has solicited the recent work of Pasquale Petrucci, creator of urban alterations (buildings) and dynamisms (people). A sophisticated theater of anonymous, striking, disenchanted, surrogate, wild, naive, out of phase and enigmatic images, a risk of a daily life that is broken and torn but also allusive, implicit, seductive and pathologically turned towards the natural direction. The dream reveals itself so real, ready to reveal itself in a flawed light that masks the body in love with the streets, the neighborhoods, the city, the territory, and burns with atmospheric colors the slice captured, the borders with its rhythms, the places where human features throb, architectures immersed in the evening otherness, insistent and implacable mirages. The images reveal the fortune and the trace of mirages, the estrangements of this sacrificial operation that invites as in an ecstasy to close the eyes and look under the push of optical impulses, while a camera captures ghosts and restless shadows, shipwrecks in waves, traces and flashes, artifices of a sure eye that knows how to capture the vain of existence. Thus Pasquale Petrucci with formative flair and corrosive shots has moved to the production of chapters where he has projected the transitoriness and beauty of the world, in diversity and evocation, discovering vertigo, drools of emptiness, filaments of siege, branching encumbrances, moving shadows, fragments of cracks, bare spots, feverish colors, announcing a network of different visual alphabets that are now the portrait of his new contamination”.
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Landscapes of the mind
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Ada Patrizia Fiorillo
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Professor of Contemporary Art History – University of FERRARA
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Pasquale Petrucci has been working on a cycle for a couple of years, which he has given the title “Nuraghe contemporanee”, for which, almost obsessively, he uses the image of an urban iconography, that of the so-called car cemeteries, which, reduced to carcasses, end up, piled up, occupying peripheral spaces of the city, still belonging to the geography of the gaze. They are compositions that I would say are formulated in the light of a temporal dislocation: images, in essence, that the artist has memorized, restoring them with the grip of a photographic fixity, according to the perspective of a rigid composition, with his thoughts evidently turned to those fortress-houses of very ancient origin, built with truncated cone-shaped stone bricks. Contemporary Nuraghe, precisely, on whose cut of immobility intervenes the fascination of the lexicon and layouts specific to the current of metaphysics that the artist often recalls in various testimonies, as a guiding dictation of his own creative path. Except then to point out that his compositions are the result of studied digital manipulations. In essence, to clarify what I argued before, the artist works on the edge of a dual time that pushes him backwards, to reconsider the de Chirico message, to the point of assuming it as the leitmotif of these paintings, and at the same time forwards, arriving at these narrations through the most recent practices of “virtual” elaboration. Nothing strange after all, since it is a question of content on the one hand and of form on the other. I would therefore be tempted, with the eye of distance, that is to say of non-direct involvement, to reread Petrucci’s creative experience outside the framework in a poetics whose references appear weak and even a little risky, as if to say occlusive, for the topicality of his research. Placing the “metaphysical painting” for the artist at the level of suggestion, since the enchantment of that season, of the motivations that had generated it in the same rendering of the expressive means with which he tried to penetrate the mystery of reality, appear today certainly unrepeatable, I would say that we should discern, on the contrary, in his paintings an original ability to relate to everyday life, to grasp through a chosen image, the restlessness, the discomfort, the tensions that accompany not only his own, but a multitude of existences. In some way Petrucci turns his attention to a “landscape” that the twentieth century has given us back as a technological and urban image, concentrating on a fragment of it, in the context of a more general indeterminacy that now, up to our days, wants completely disintegrated the possibility of drawing a unitary image of reality or at least coherent with the development of human history. Perhaps it is precisely in relation to this state of consciousness, radicalized in the subjective perception of the scenario in which we are immersed, that we should read the artist’s inclination to repeat the assumed iconic subject, almost a form of coercion, favored by the use of the expressive medium itself. It has been said in fact that Petrucci has chosen the language of “mediality” as the prevalent technique of these creations that rise to the value of painting, whether they are those mixed techniques, obtained from the amalgamation of photography and oil colors, or those that he calls “photocompositions” resulting from the application of digital practice alone. This latter choice is not accidental, to be read as an added value to the need to communicate. In fact, works such as Composition NV 033, Purple modular element, Red balance, Hourglass, Fire, all from 2005, remain central and even more iconic in this journey, where the artist plays on the interference of chromatic modulation as a founding element of the composition that welcomes and distributes the same subject (the demolished cars) according to various formal perspectives, now following the soaring of precarious vertical balances, now the perpendicularity of a horizontal line, up to the accumulation (the ascetic attraction of the mountain) or the saturation of the page as in Fire. This last work is among the most intriguing of the cycle, where the subject becomes a sign-writing, a symbol, taken beyond the decorative value, as a means to the design of an impenetrable scenario. These are landscapes of the mind, on which, to sharpen the perception of the artefact, the cold light of the monitor intervenes, uniforming even in the variation of the chromatic layers. Clear areas of red and black, green and blue, grey and blue, yellow and red, artfully studied in the dosage of tints and tones. They are the same colours that, animated, reappear in the mixed techniques where Petrucci uses brushes to fill with the body of oil, voids and interstices created in the photographic recording of the subject. Conceptually the escape from a
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marzo 2006
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Critical literary presentation of the pictorial works of P. Petrucci
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curata da C A R L A R U G G E R
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Association International des Critiques Littèraires-P A R I S –
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The transcendent: this is the key word that should bring greater awareness to human existence – even if finitude belongs to us, even if the gaze does not go beyond the faint line of the horizon. There is the introspective gaze, that searching within in a quiet delirium of senses and spirit and from that ancestral recess, projecting outward a pure gaze smoothed from every dross-impediment. The pictorial art of Petrucci Pasquale – enriched with symbols, is strengthened by virtue of an imprinted color – sometimes with lightness – sometimes with material thickness, or again, with the “choleric force” that belongs to the author and the color – this entity that belongs to us deeply and in various aspects seduces and disturbs, submits so that we can welcome with our eyes (G O E T H E ): “the totality, that is, the perfect balance, because the search for life makes use of colors, sounds, everything that our senses perceive of the external world and that perhaps, all things considered, already exists within us.”
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Therefore, to enter into this path of memory – memory that makes use of the fragmentary nature of life, that “feeds” on apparently useless things but which in context give the measure of our existence – is necessary for the Author in reaching an Idea, to trust in this to reach the user, the one who does not know but who carries within himself the germ of knowledge sometimes flattened, or extinguished, deriving from the epochal scenario in which he is living.
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Only the Artist is granted the gift of investigating the origin of being, its transformation, projecting himself into a dimension not foreign to his thirst to appropriate the truth, or part of being. Gift and suffering, rigorous investigation, creativity-encounter. This is the highest aim of an Art that grants everything and takes everything away if the purity of the gesture that is memory and synthesis is missing. Pasquale Petrucci has within himself the creative force that pushes him into the vast sea of possibilities, of the variability of an encounter with the coloristic material for a metaphysical conception of things and the world. Talking about this very particular vision that invests Petrucci’s art in theoretical and practical form, is to delve into substrata of consciences in which purposes and intentions flow, dynamic projections that flow into relived and transformed realities, in which the user can risk his introspection for new freedom of thought, of communication.
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Concretely I affirm that Petrucci’s pictorial personalities assume a singular connotation in today’s artistic scenario – they emerge with the intrinsic peculiarity that is that of communicating – What? The object transfigured and placed in the act of highlighting complex states of mind – not only: affirming that their appearance is not a mere intrusion – but connoting, rejecting the ordinary, “illuminating” for moments the common vision of what animates and surrounds us, so that thought reaches considerations that go beyond the daily routine of living. Let’s add the introspective vision of a nature with its “cuts” that affect the landscape in movement. They dissolve ancestral bonds that sometimes resist to lead us into a fluid current of thought and feeling of living.
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The evolutionary force of color is evident, that internal propulsive push, which animates the figures, the interiors – that “landscape” of apparent immobility, which shines with its own light and at the same time reaches us, penetrates our individuality of finite and unreasonable beings. The woman – an irreplaceable entity, becomes and takes on by the will of the author – transfigured embellished by that proposing elements – key to diversifying her existence, to grasp her in the affirmation of a reality that goes beyond the same – in a space or dimension that goes beyond everything because her “entry” into the world is unique and unrepeatable – a world that the Author himself desires for the Woman free from patterns and impositions – an emergence from the ground of history dressed in a new identity – an atypical figure in a dimension that frees itself from materiality to reach transcendence, breaking the possible and there – emerging with her enigma, the incomplete answers but which nevertheless give the measure that the truth is among things and the world.
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Pasquale Petrucci – with his rigorous investigation towards a metaphysical vision – opens a breach towards this direction of ideality and beauty in which the observer can encounter a truth in the depths of things or events that gradually take on metamorphosis and transcendence in the ordinary rhythm of life. From this encounter-clash with a disarming reality, the freedom to grasp what is beyond – what cannot be grasped, but which is, exists in us, lives in the artist’s soul as a viable goal that will lead him to enlightening hypotheses and perfection.
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C A R L A R U G G E RASA DELL’ARTE Mestrino PADOVA 
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GABRIELLA NIERO
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Between figuration and geometric abstraction, the poetics of the master PETRUCCI PASQUALE grows and develops, gradually reaching calibrated compositional results. Objects in space are a constant source of inspiration, a means to break down the form, to make it new and vibrant. Color follows the modulations of the geometries, creating original light effects.
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GABRIELLA NIERO
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NATASHA BORDIGLIA associazione culturale diip
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The world of demolished cars is the horizon within which the cycle of works NURAGHE CONTEMPORANEE moves, which includes the panels Equilibrio Rosso and Clessidra. The reference to the issue of recycling is constant and in the two works just mentioned it is accentuated by the composition. In Equilibrio Rosso the cars are distributed along ascending lines whose shape leads the eye to wander and focus its attention now on one detail, now on another, to then get lost in the red of the background. Reading becomes possible only from a distance where the accumulation takes on the appearance of a peninsula, of land invaded by scrap, surrounded by a sea now far from its original color. The play of interferences between the subject represented and the way in which it occupies the space becomes more explicit in Clessidra where the reference to the temporal dimension is evident, already declared by the title of the work itself. The colors chosen by Petrucci for this panel contribute to the general sense of the work in which the request for attention to the environment now becomes a warning.
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NATASHA BORDIGLIA
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ALICE CASTELLANI Urbs Urbis Collettiva d’Arte VERONA
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The artist approaches the dimension of the city in a European key, with a gaze capable, through urban compositions, of evoking the profound connection between different canons of beauty. On one side the cold architectural line, on the other the soft curve of the human body. Both allow themselves to be shaped by light to better highlight their beauty. The urban models taken into consideration are the main European capitals, to strengthen through the universal language of art, the awareness of the collective enrichment of the artistic heritage in a united Europe. The mixed technique sees antiqued black and white photos marrying with oil colors on canvas.
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ALICE CASTELLANI
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MARIAROSARIA BELGIOVINE
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The artist lives and works in Salerno, his works are visible in the virtual gallery of his personal website. His research flows fluidly towards communicative anxieties guided by his artistic introspection. Pasquale Petrucci’s works exalt the ocular trace; the Artist expresses himself with great creative force by solving architectural constructions, and filtering figures symbolizing structures and sign settings. The verticality of the work combines lively harmonies of memory, capable of defining his own expressive language, translating symbolic atmospheres with metaphors of reality. Petrucci translates his freedom to communicate with commitment and methodical study, constantly absorbed in his fantastic creation of parallel worlds, seeking forms of emotional energy in which to identify and extract vital force, enlivening the vision of each narrated theme with descriptions on the borders of the unconscious.
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MARIAROSARIA BELGIOVINE
