For his first solo exhibition in the space of Vistamare gallery in Pescara, Lorenzo Scotto di Luziowhose practice has been characterized since the beginning by an osmotic action articulated between the various expressive forms – from installation to drawing, from video animation to performance -, focuses on painting, which has always had a central role in his production .
In the six rooms of the gallery, it exhibits forty new works created between 2023 and 2024, which seem to transpose a verse by the poet Sandro Penna into painting: ‘one flower calls another’.
These floral paintings go beyond the intention of formally exploring such a recurring motif in the history of art. Although suffering from a certain attraction both towards the painting of the early twentieth century in Italy and towards the chromatic atmospheres typical of Edward Hopper’s painting, Scotto di Luzio reinvents and transforms the compositional values now with bright tones, now with faint shades or even with a white and scratchy black, in a continuous game of mirrors between cultured painting and naïve painting.
In its captivating simplicity, the exhibition could disorientate and almost irritate due to the apparent ease with which the artist proposes a disengaged and demystified painting.
If in the past Scotto di Luzio has often used his own image in his work, in the broader framework of a reflection on contemporary society, in this exhibition he turns exclusively to natural images, as if to avoid the narrative of identity in an era focused on identity, on the body and on its perception. Yet in some of the works on display, alongside the flowers, the residues of human presence are captured, evoked through objects extracted from everyday life – a solitary cigarette abandoned on the ashtray, a notepad that recalls an appointment, a newspaper forgotten on the tram – like excerpts from a personal novel.
Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio was born in Pozzuoli (Naples) in 1972. Among his personal exhibitions we remember: “An extraordinary exhibition”, Vistamare Milano, (2022); “In your mouth everything dies”, Kunst Meran, Merano (2017); “Pane al Pane”, Morra Greco Foundation, Naples (2015); “One less person”, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2010); “Untitled”, Ancient & Modern Gallery, London (2008); “Tableaux Vivant”, Madre Museum, Naples (2007). He currently lives and works in Berlin.
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