PERETO (AQ) – The Cultural Association straperetana is pleased to announce the exhibition “Homage to Domenico Penna” which will open to the public on Sunday 5 May.
Domenico Penna (Pereto, 1953-2023) was a key figure for the L’Aquila village, where from the early years of his artistic training he decided to work and live, creating a vast pictorial production, ranging from oil paintings on canvas, to blood paintings , in watercolours, a technique that he has increasingly favored over the years.
There were many subjects he treated during his activity, from portraiture to landscape, much of which was linked to his land.
Attentive and acute observer, with great descriptive ability, Penna has always been able to convey, within his compositions, an extraordinary adherence to reality.
The Palazzo Maccafani exhibition focuses on a very specific group of works created over several years, from a first Crucifixion from 1973, with large, flat color backgrounds and intense chromatic highlights, to the unprecedented painting of a young woman ( 1980), restored for the exhibition, in which there are echoes of Casorati’s painting and the portrait of his daughter Cecilia, still a child, from 1990.
The exhibition offers a less well-known cross-section of the artist’s production, both for the type of technique used – many of the paintings on display are oils on canvas – and for the variety of subjects portrayed, trying to encourage his great aptitude for colour, increasingly perfected over the following decades through watercolor.
These are suspended atmospheres in the portraits exhibited at Palazzo Maccafani, whose characters seem to float in an indefinite and timeless background like the close-up portrait of a Saint, or the painter’s own self-portrait.
In the fresco room there is a rearrangement of the artist’s studio and a splendid painting by Pereto – also a portrait, in truth, but of the village itself – created in 2018.
In the corridor adjacent to the internal garden, there is a selection of sanguine works, another technique dear to the artist, created between the end of the 1990s and 2010.
Domenico Penna received an artistic-cultural recognition from the Municipal Administration of Pereto in 2009, on the occasion of the Premio Hombres Gian Gabriello Maccafani, for his commitment to enhancing local cultural events.
His signature is in fact the graphic profile of his hometown, which has become the logo and symbol of some associations and cultural events in Pereto. (Gigarte)
We thank Anna Cristofari and Giovanni Meuti for their precious help in selecting the works on display and for their great support in this initiative.
The exhibition can be visited on Saturdays and Sundays from 4pm to 8pm until 26 May.
