A bit of an ape, both man and woman: Luigi Presicce's Homo Sapiens Sapiens

RizzutoGallery in Palermo presents Homo sapiens sapiens, a solo exhibition by Luigi Presicce(Porto Cesareo, 1976) that will be on view until Feb. 6, 2021, Tuesday through Saturday, by appointment only.

Trained in the field of painting, Luigi Presicce (born in Salento, but lives and works in Florence) for years has synthesized the results of his studies with the language of performance, staging tableaux vivants with a metaphysical and surreal character, with echoes from popular iconography, collective and personal memories, rich in allegories and symbolic allusions to esotericism, religion, traditions and ancient beliefs of his homeland. Rituals, stratifications, and references to art history, personalities and events in recent history have marked all of Presicce’s research, in which the intense symbolic force of the images and the constructive layout have always declared his pictorial matrix.

In the last three years he has returned to painting, and in Homo sapiens sapiens he presents in particular the work of the last year. “Painting,” Presicce declares, “has always been for me an inexhaustible resource of discovery and perhaps one of the very few ways I have had to approach the human being.” Starting from his personal conflict with today’s ungainly civilization, veteran of difficult months, Luigi Presicce has embarked on a new and personal pictorial evolution, after various reflections on society, on human behavior, coming to the question of whether we are talking about the evolution of a chosen species or a sub-species of involution, or evolution gone wrong.

For Presicce, painting is the medium with which to dissect the world, investigate it and bring it back to legibility, and out of his instincts, a little shamanic, a little anthropological, figures began to emerge. Portraits in saturated and sometimes caricatured tones, saints and infants, smoking animals, dogs, parrots, monkeys. And then these beings that look like monkeys, but really are not or only partially so. Ambiguous presences, covered in slight hair, with both male and female attributes, but this does not compromise their attitude or expression. It is certainly a new species:Homo sapiens sapiens. But are they evolved apes narcissistically imposing themselves on our gaze or are they involuted humans sucked into a screen? This is the artist’s question, which he leaves the answer to the visitor.

For all information you can call +39 347.1769901 or visit RizzutoGallery’s official website.

Pictured: Luigi Presicce, Leone and Music (2020; oil on canvas, 180 x 200 cm)

A bit of an ape, both man and woman: Luigi Presicce's Homo Sapiens Sapiens

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.