Milan, double exhibition at Eduardo Secci: Alfredo Pirri and Radu Oreian

Double exhibition at the Eduardo Secci Gallery in its Milan location: from October 8 to November 27, 2021, Acustica, a solo show by Alfredo Pirri (Cosenza, 1957) curated by Laura Cherubini, and Limone, lemon, an exhibition by the young Romanian painter Radu Oreian (Târnăveni, 1984), curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto, the latter in the NOVO project space, will in fact be held.

Pirri’s exhibition consists of watercolors, six large ones (250 centimeters in height by 117 in base, including frames): “large enough for how we normally imagine watercolors,” Pirri himself explains, “and in fact, when you open your mouth to pronounce the word watercolor something minor resonates in the hollow of your head, both in size and in technical and ideal commitment, a playful and light matter comes to mind. Indeed, these works are transparent and luminous, as the technique dictates, yet they possess a dark presence that is difficult to define in words. Inside and on the surface, they are animated by a nameless force that makes them appear alien to tradition and yet within it. In fact, they are watercolors on paper (well-made) glued on aluminum and framed. Together there will be others of different sizes, some very small, at the origin of this series. They are best talked about using words unrelated to art, for which ’acoustic’ is appropriate. You see round marks surrounded by haloes that open and overlap, sometimes reminiscent of rain falling and bouncing inside puddles, sometimes a bit gross other times open and bright. What happens is that everything vibrates together by resonating shapes and colors. Those same ones within which we live immersed inside cities, at their edges, and then further away where, perhaps, we would like to live.” Pirri’s exhibition can also be viewed online, on the gallery’s website.

Alfredo Pirri lives and works in Rome, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts graduating in painting. His work, on the border between painting and sculpture, architecture and installation, has been meeting the attention of international audiences since the mid-1980s. Matter, volume, color and space are the main tools of his poetics. The originality of his practice lies in the use of painting as a vehicle of light and light as an architectural and spatial element. His art generates a harmonious confrontation with architecture and constantly tends to the creation of an archetypal place, habitable and at the same time intended for a public function. He has exhibited in museums and biennials in Italy and abroad, including the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, MoMA PS1 in New York, the Venice Art Biennale and the Havana Biennale. He has been a lecturer at many universities, including La Sapienza University in Rome and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He currently teaches painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila.

As for Oreian’s exhibition, the body of works on display includes recent large and small canvases, with which the Romanian artist continues the pictorial reflection initiated in previous exhibitions in Florence (Eduardo Secci, 2021) and Rome (La Fondazione, 2020). This is a selection of small and large paintings made for the occasion that, in addition to confirming his poetics, somehow enrich his lexicon by integrating it with new, unexpected nuances, both on a technical and compositional level. His strongly expressive painting, made of dense matter at times plastic (thanks to the technique with which it is arranged on the plane, layered and kneaded at the tip of the brush), also turns on, in today’s case, new investigations, particularly on the variation of colors. Evidence of this, for example, is the canvas Lemon , Lemon (2021), hence the title of the exhibition, made by drawing inspiration from the observation of two lemons stored in the refrigerator at home during the recent lockdown and left to their disintegration process. As well as Anemones or Marguerites (2021) characterized by a wide chromatic range that corresponds to that associated with the seasonal and typological changes of the flowers portrayed and that the artist has examined and memorized over time. Or, Gothic tornado II (2021), of considerable size, where the tonal exercise is broken by sudden bursts of tone.

With today’s exhibition, Oreian continues its reflection on the value of images in the age of globalization and virtual reality, which, having fallen out of control and unregulated, risks losing its original semantic value and, consequently, any reference to its cultural and social identity of reference. A procedure, this one, that confirms the universal framework of its operative pacing, where the current element is only a cue for a broader reconnaissance of reality.

As Pier Paolo Pancotto writes in his introductory text, “even from the iconographic point of view, the works conceived for the exhibition in Milan see Oreian’s vocabulary opening up to new visual opportunities. The intellectual memory (the Renaissance painting, the classical one admired in Pompeii and Rome or the Etruscan one learned in Tarquinia, the calligraphy of the ancient East), which has always been accompanied by the physical one (the recall to the bowels of one’s body, to one’s skin or to one’s biological fluids), seems to find more and more space in the artist’s creative exercise by implementing it with new suggestions. In particular, various references to the ancient emerge, surfacing on the canvas with the force of distant memories, weak in visual definition but intense in emotional terms. Thus, unexpected narrative pieces emerge among the organic color plots, according to an original as well as personal interpretation of the surrealist syntax enacted by the artist.” Radu Oreian’s research is inspired by the classical techniques of drawing and painting, exploring how history, ancient myths and archives shape our society and our understanding of humanity. The red thread that runs through and unites his works manifests itself in the creation of a new meditative visual imprint endowed with a special density, which seems to exist in a pulsating state of tension and relaxation. The exhibition can be viewed online at NOVO’s website.

Image: Radu Oreian, Anemones (2021; oil on canvas, 30 x 24 cm). Photo The Knack Studio

Milan, double exhibition at Eduardo Secci: Alfredo Pirri and Radu Oreian

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