Alla luce della pittura / Pierluigi Antonucci

Curated by Daniela Pietranico

The exhibition brings together more than sixty small oil paintings created in recent years by artist Pierluigi Antonucci, mainly in his studio in Popoli (PE), the Abruzzo town to which he returned to live and work after his years in Milan.
Born in 1982, Antonucci favors a slow, provincial, landscape-based painting practice. His is a painting of memory—conceived and measured, yet at the same time light and tinged with melancholy. Working from memory, Antonucci depicts natural views of the surroundings, houses, courtyards, still lifes, windows, and slices of sky in which the artist’s subjectivity and emotions prevail. Rather than concealing them, he allows these feelings to guide his artistic research.
He focuses his attention on color rather than drawing: he does not hesitate to paint colored shadows or trees with unusual hues; atmospheric variations where light tones contrast with complementary shadows in all their shades of blue and brown.
Often familiar in subject matter, his landscapes are stripped of any superfluous decoration and dissolve into their surroundings, without defined contours—like memories.
He frequently employs truncated perspectives, with vanishing points that escape the edges of the canvas, cuts the tops of trees, or deliberately shifts the subject off-center.
His compositions often feature rapid, textured brushstrokes over backgrounds laid down like watercolor washes. This approach creates a sense of incompleteness that suggests an impression—contrasts of light and shadow that mirror on the canvas the sensations and visual perceptions that the natural or domestic landscape communicates to him at various times of day or under particular lighting conditions.
“What time is it?” This is the question the artist asks himself whenever he approaches a canvas Light, central to his practice, appears as faint or dominant, atmospheric or artificial, yet always present—even when hidden behind clouds or emanating from the projector of an old cinema. Grateful for the teachings of masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin for still lifes and Giorgio Morandi for his monumental houses rendered in their full volume, Antonucci also dedicates a heartfelt remembrance to Nino Spallone, a beloved friend and Abruzzo-born artist who embraced the London abstract movement in the 1950s.

His love for the colors and shades of his homeland has led him to overturn traditional priorities, emphasizing the essential and guiding the public through a sensitive experience rooted in the light of painting. The exhibition is accompanied by the music of Abruzzese singer-songwriter Ivan Graziani, whose songs—now part of Italy’s musical heritage—evoke that peculiar feeling of being “damned with melancholy”, just as one might feel when contemplating Antonucci’s works

22 June – 20 July 2024

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday

4:00 PM – 7:00 PM and by appointment