Partners & Mucciaccia, modern and contemporary art gallery, presents Storyboards, Interni & Vedute, London 2018 by the Italian post-modern master painter Piero Pizzi Cannella.
Following the great success of Piero Pizzi Cannella’s solo exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg, Salon de musique and Other Paintings, Partners & Mucciaccia is proud to present twenty-one new works, fourteen paintings on canvas and seven mix-media works on paper, by the Master conceived specifically for the gallery in London.
Pizzi Cannella’s Storyboards Interni & Vedute or “interiors and landscapes” evokes the poetry of daily-life, and how this lives on within us. From maps and landscapes to dresses, tables and chairs, these recurring and familiar images appear to the viewer like reveries or fond memories. The artist hardly offers any hint of when or where something is set.
Seemingly suspended, the object of his attention invariably occupies the center of the canvas or paper. As if hovering in mid-air, painted in black or sometimes white, the main focus stands boldly at the fore much like a Zen circle would. However, his symbols are set against a cloudy atmosphere created by his ethereal earth-toned backgrounds. The total effect is timeless, and gives his work a delicate dream-like clarity, at once both unique and universal.
“One always starts with a drawing … At times it is not there, yet all us painters we carry it within us. This exhibition is conceived like this! As a storyboard that thinks, plans, modifies and is definitive (maybe).” Pizzi Cannella, 2018.
Pizzi Cannella highlights the ambiguity of the creative process – the author rarely knows where this will take him/her, sometimes you have a clearer picture in your mind, sometimes you let this creative instinct guide you to create something that you did not totally understand before. A word, a colour, a sensation, a memory, which may be undefined, but to which your creativity will give form. Through brush strokes, passion and determination, the artist makes the intangible tangible, crafting a bridge between the esoteric and material, interweaving a motif between intuition and realization. Ultimately initiating the viewer on an uncertain journey, full of colour and questions.
Pizzi Cannella is aligned with the history of the avant-garde, but he is clearly free in how he associates with it. As one of the major exponents of the New Roman School, from the mid 70s into the 80s his work showed a reappearance of crafting, that is a return to drawing and painting and to manual skills that together reconcile art with tradition. An area of resistance to the trans-avant-garde, an attention to the memory, towards a more universal dimension of the artistic experience, and greater celebration of the creative process. Storyboards Interni & Vedute London 2018 shows how, in the last decades, the artist has mastered an aesthetic that is neither shot-through with explanation nor so abstract that one cannot relate but rather respectful of tradition and thoroughly postmodern in position.
