Artist’s statement on the expressive characteristics of his artistic practice.
By Pasquale Petrucci
My art can be defined as mainly multifaceted, that is, free from repetitive expressive creations. My aesthetic creativity, in fact, is not limited to oil painting on canvas, but extends to various expressive forms: Land Art, Mail Art, Artist’s Books and photography. The photographs are currently composed of different operational cycles; the photographs of everyday life / informal photographs that were made with subjects of old, aged, faded and partially erased metropolitan graffiti / décollage photographs that were created with subjects from advertising posters destroyed by the elements, but with a real aesthetic iconography that anagraphically belongs to the urban landscape. For me, contemporaneity is understood as a form of expression in continuous evolution. My newly signed artistic and interdisciplinary testimonies are present on my personal website www.pasqualepetrucci.it/+ /my-storytelling-art/galleria di arte contemporanea.
There is no single common thread in my oil paintings on canvas, where highly stylized human figures alternate with the inclusion of household objects that accompany our daily lives. I often insert a rural context to integrate the objects with overlays of urban elements necessary to consolidate the link between art and architecture. The entire production develops through the paths that have characterized the entire expressive research, which began with the compositions and arrived at the “Men and Men” project, currently underway.
The “Men and Men” project focuses on the freedom of each individual to live their own existence through the personal choices that define their personality. Furthermore, the uniqueness of the human race would lead to a lack of alternatives, that is, to a socio-economic and cultural flattening. The project was created by creating stylized silhouettes and completing them with oil colors on canvas through free and informal brushstrokes, with discontinuous and alternating shades. The predisposition towards a greater development of the creative dynamic has had over time a continuous development of the stylised silhouettes by inserting further compositional elements into the project which currently takes shape with the inclusion of thick beards necessary to identify similarities with the Asian look. A consistent and ongoing interest in an Asian look turns out to be not just a simple oriental trend but a personal choice that breaks away from the usual patterns. Diversity of aesthetic choices that strengthen common resources are necessary for further social development of the evolution of the human race and inevitably further characterize the essence of the “Men and Men” project. The malleable plasticity of oil colors on canvas, through the predilection for different and opposite shades, helps to stabilize the compositional space. The only element common to all the paintings is the chromatic activity, characterised by full brush strokes without rigid silhouettes, very similar to informal painting.
