“Lorenzo Peretti (1871 – 1953). Nature and mystery” is the new exhibition organized by CPoscio collection in the exhibition space of Casa De Rodis in Domodossola. The exhibition, curated by Elena Pontiggia, organically investigates for the first time the figure of Peretti, the most mysterious and unknown of the Vigezzo painters, framing him in the context of his time. The exhibition will be open from May 26th to October 26th.
The exhibition includes approx eighty works and retraces the entire brief story of this singular artist (“misanthropic character and artist in the true sense” his teacher Enrico Cavalli said of him), who painted for only a dozen years, never exhibited in his life and in his studio didn’t let anyone in, so much so that his figure as a cultured intellectual, imbued with religious tension, was often mistaken for that of an alchemist smelling of witchcraft.
The exhibition presents all his main works, including the visionary “Bosco dei druidi”, ca. 1898 (a forest inhabited by thousand-year-old priests, perhaps inspired by Bellini’s Norma), his most important pointillist landscapes of Val Vigezzo and the early, anticipatory unfinished paintings from the early twentieth century.
The exhibition itinerary begins in 1890, when Peretti attended the Rossetti Valentini school in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he was a student of Enrico Cavalli and has as a companion Carlo Fornara. On display, among other things, are the three evocative portraits of Carlaccin, a farmer from Vigezzo painted by both Cavalli and Fornara and Peretti. The works of his friends Ciolina, Rastellinithe same Fornara And Arthur Tosi (present with an astonishing alcoholic nude from 1895 which anticipates informal painting by half a century) make up the second section of the exhibition.
They are also documented the artist’s trip to Lyon in 1893-94 (where he saw the impressionist and post-impressionist painting and the material painting of Monticelli) and the works that followed shortly thereafter, including Portrait of Father Bernardino, loaned by the Civic Museums of Domodossola, a touching human document in which Peretti reconciles with his deceased father, who had opposed his pictorial vocation.
The is then analyzed divisionism irregular and full of tension by Peretti, of which the greatest examples are exhibited (including “Oratorio” and “Lavandaie alla lanca di Toceno e Paesaggio”, all from 1895-97). Appreciated by Morbelli, who included him among the protagonists of the trend, the painter from Vigezzo however refused to exhibit with the pointillists. Vast space is dedicated to his recently rediscovered “Philosophical Testament”, a document of his desire to reconcile Christianity with theosophy, which is a central aspect of his personality. For him, nature is a reflection of the infinite and there is nothing in the world that is not a reflection of God. After a large section of drawings, the exhibition concludes with an anthology of his unfinished works, including of which Sottobosco and the important Paris, 1903.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by SAGEP with an analytical text by Elena Pontiggia and a writing by Davide Brullo.
