Rome, three outsiders on display at Palazzo Merulana: Aller, Boille and Pignotti

In Rome, Palazzo Merulana hosts, from January 23 to March 13, 2022, a group exhibition dedicated to three great Italian masters of pictorial abstraction: Bruno Aller, Luigi Boille, and Lamberto Pignotti.The intent of the exhibition, organized by CoopCulture and Fondazione Elena and Claudia Cerasi, is to investigate, analyze and propose a common nexus among the three artists and at the same time look at possible “frictions,” being convinced that this “diversity” arises and originates from a point in common for all three authors, that is, from the infinite variations of the “sign.” The sign is the protagonist, in its variable configuration, within the aesthetic and thought research of each of them.

In Luigi Boille, the sign is the primary element, it is existential thing: the sign is the point where everything can begin, it is the element chosen by the artist necessary to paint, it is “being” that, distilled and reduced to the minimum perceptible, still manages to give life to every surface investigated. Lamberto Pignotti, among the pioneers of visual poetry, has always been a builder of alternative alphabets for an altered language where words and images are reformulated, rethought, reread and revised, cut out for sharp collages, from the deliberately apparently popular language. Bruno Aller, an artist of a different generation than Boille and Pignotti, is linked to them by an old and strong friendship. His graphic pictorial work, long characterized by the “Re-tracts” series, is linguistically distant from both previous artists, although he seems in some ways to have embraced part of the two distant lessons, sharing on the one hand Boille’s choice in stubbornly and proudly pursuing the language of painting, and on the other hand grasping, in Pignotti’s verbo-visual fragments, the social-political aspect.

To be an outsider is to reject that which distances, separates and distracts from art, it is the knowing how to reject, to corner oneself on the edge of things, but working tenaciously: outsider is “taking the right distance from collateral dross, it is the shunning of the producers of sadness,” as Bruno Aller himself writes. One can think that the choices of Boille, Pignotti and Aller, in critically keeping themselves so to speak “on the margin,” were in-born and matured at different times and in different ways, but that nonetheless makes them very close, distinguishes them, and has seen them authors without shortcuts in their work, consistently pursuing their own language.

The exhibition will present a total of about 60 works including some large formats, including two double-face works by Luigi Boille from 1958, three banners by Lamberto Pignotti exhibited in 2019 at the Centre Pompidour in Paris, a secular altarpiece and also a secular parable by Bruno Aller.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Palazzo Merulana.

Rome, three outsiders on display at Palazzo Merulana: Aller, Boille and Pignotti

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