Are they dreams or premonitions? Familiar faces or figures that emerge from territories foreign to reason? Entering Piero Roccasalvo’s new exhibition Rub (Syracuse, 1974) means becoming aware of the limits of understanding and objectivity of what is around us. Hosting the works of the Sicilian artist, born in 1974, is the Ceravento gallery in Pescara, a precious contemporary bastion directed by Loris Maccarone. Container of ideas, “whose ambition is to be able to create artistic projects that arise and take shape from the involvement of the artists themselves”, the gallery turns the spotlight on the anxieties of the Syracusan painter, transforming its environments into a series of “Thinking Rooms” (to quote David Lynch) suspended between the dreamlike and the real.
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Piero Roccasalvo’s exhibition in Pescara
The theme of the dream, moreover, is expressed right from the title of the project: Visions of Absencea phrase that invites us to understand the thirty works on display (almost all unpublished and created between 2018 and 2024) as pretexts for constructing narratives that go beyond the surface of experience: the painting, in this sense, becomes a “portal” towards worlds populated by human and animal figures that have much in common with Goya’s “carichos”. The sleep of reason generates monsters it is a far from subtle reference within the exhibition itinerary: just as in the engraving of the Spanish master from the unconscious of a supine old man emerge disturbing beings that goad man inviting him to awaken, in Roccasalvo’s works owls, infantile figures not at all innocent and statues with a classical flavor invite the observer to become aware of his own inner monsters. But at what price?
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Piero Roccasalvo between drawing and painting
Elegant and material, the works condense the artist’s technical ability: we move from the sophisticated drawings of the last room (works on paper that seem to have come from a secret notebook of Gino De Dominicis) to the human portraits displayed on the corridor wall: a sequence of inquiring faces, frozen on cardboard with mixed media. Accompanied by the room text by Andrea Guastalla, the exhibition remains open to the public until 11 May 2024.
Alex Urso
DISCOVER the Ceravento gallery HERE
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