Fiamma pilota le ombre seguono
Alessandro Pessoli
Three large canvases echo and reflect one another evocatively, taking as their matrix, their “pilot light”, the complex subject of the Crucifixion.
Pessoli’s painting is eclectic, rich in memories and historical sedimentations (from metaphysics via surrealism to popular visual culture) with which it shares an empathetic bond, succeeding perfectly in interiorising the sense of a continuity running through the history of art.
In this exhibition, as in other works that the artist has produced recently, images belonging to a religious iconographic tradition are brought up to date and become vehicles of potential figural reinventions.
With this background register forever present, Pessoli reinvents and recalibrates the forms and emotive intensity of these figures, setting up an intimate dialogue between them and the landscape into which they are absorbed, according them a varied lightness and creating a balance between drama and pictorial playfulness.
As for his method, Pessoli’s work is constructed using a free mix of techniques and styles: the artisanal, manual quality of collage and spray paint applied over stencils is fused with the more traditional pictorial gesture, becoming an integral part of it.
Pessoli’s painting is thus created through a process of linguistic construction and deconstruction, both symbolic and physical, in which the erased, covered, leftover parts often constitute the painting’s basic structure, in search of an interior truth that is manifested in the vitality of the image and the brushstroke, an objective that the artist is continually striving to achieve in his work. Painting has always been for Pessoli a language of choice, from the start of his career in the 1980s right up until today.