Uffizi, Lorenzo Puglisi's Self-Portrait in the Dark enters the collections.

New donation to the Uffizi Galleries: it is Ritratto 270418 (Self-Portrait), a self-portrait in the dark that painter Lorenzo Puglisi (Biella, 1971) made in 2018. The work had been exhibited last year at an exhibition at theArt Museum Riga Bourse in Latvia’s capital, in dialogue with Tintoretto ’s Portrait of a Man, which the Florentine museum loaned for the occasion. Now the painting by Puglisi, an author characterized by thewidespread use of a deep black from which strokes of light emanate to define volumes and figures, particularly faces and hands, has officially entered the Uffizi collections.

"Right from the start, I was interested in looking for a material, ’sculptural’ painting, visually energetic and dense but at the same time directed toward a rarefaction of the parts, in an attempt at essentiality of representation: thus the hands and the face, there where life manifests itself most powerfully, immersed in darkness, in the mystery of existence,“ says the artist. ”The face is the most expressive and deepest manifestation of human emotion. The face is the part that strikes me the most in a human being, all this expressiveness and strength. As far as the body is concerned, that’s it, maybe I feel I’m very distant from it."

“In this ’black manner’ of his, Puglisi fits into a tradition of strongly chiaroscuro painting familiar to us and also exhibited at the Uffizi-from the Venetian sixteenth century to the Caravaggesque, from the eighteenth-century Tenebrists to Romantic painting,” commented the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt. “Lorenzo Puglisi’s self-portrait, a gift for which we are very grateful, also enters a specific section of the Galleries’ historical collections, that of self-portraits: since the time of Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, this has been the most up-to-date and contemporary artist-oriented strand.”

Uffizi, Lorenzo Puglisi's Self-Portrait in the Dark enters the collections.

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