Venice, Nello Petrucci's Profiles on display at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo

Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo, recently restored and reopened to the public, presents the solo exhibition PROFILI by Pompeian artist Nello Petrucci, curated by Chiara Canali and with critical presentation by Luca Beatrice. The exhibition, promoted by Contemply Art & Investment, is hosted inside the Tintoretto Room on the second floor, with access from Scala Contarini del Bovolo in Venice, and can be visited until August 26, 2022.

A personality already recognized in the Italian and international art scene, Nello Petrucci is an Italian author and film maker who works using different expressive techniques (from painting to collage, from halftone photographic print to silkscreen) and intervening within different media and linguistic fields (from cinema to contemporary art, from street art to public art).

In his collage and décollage works, Nello Petrucci starts from an action of finding, collecting, and reproducing fragments of decomposed and estranged reality (the pieces of movie posters and affiches), which he submits to the attention of the viewer’s consciousness, associated with close-up portraits of characters from the sphere of history, music, or cinema, so that consciousness can freely dispose of them.

With regard to both the profiles recovered from classicism and the subjects coming from cinema, Petrucci has deliberately identified and chosen the halftone technique precisely because of this characteristic of being “low definition,” opaque, discontinuous, because by providing little visual information to the viewer, it requires him or her to be more involved, more participatory in order to complete what is only suggested by the mosaic mesh of dots.

This halftone procedure is taken to extremes and becomes a full-fledged subject in the Street Art interventions conceived and realized by Petrucci for the urban context and placed extemporaneously in various cities in Italy and around the world.

Considered as an image in “low definition,” in which the dots of the photographic screen become visible and exhibit the gaps and voids that separate them, the halftone photographic image lends itself to be taken as a model for an alternative vision of history and reality: a vision aimed at breaking down the present into fragments and reassembling it into new configurations according to the operative principle of cinematic “montage.” Here, then, Nello Petrucci’s training and aptitude as a filmmaker also returns in the poetics of the street artist.

As Chiara Canali states, “Together with the halftone technique, the artist uses a kind of scenic montage that allows him to migrate images from one medium to another, from one context to another and from one historical time to another, but also highlights the shifts in meaning, the distortions and anachronies produced by such migrations. This allows him to intervene sharply and vibrantly on some burning issues of our present day, to awaken the perceptive, cognitive and social participation of the viewer on certain issues such as the right to vote, the judicial system, health surveillance, squatting, financial speculation, and the contradictions of war.”

The last monumental work, specially designed for the solo exhibition at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo, is titled Hell and was created in dialogue with Jacopo Tintoretto’s sketch, preserved there, relating to the large canvass of Paradise in the Doge’s Palace. In contrast to Robusti’s Paradise, which had intended to reconstruct, in a celestial sphere, the hierarchical perfection of the Venetian government, Petrucci reinterprets a dramatic image of earthly Hell, taken in Ukraine at the moment when a statue of Christ was removed from the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv and taken to a bunker to be protected from Russian bombing. Once again, the inconsistencies and antinomies of war are found in the burden hanging from Christ’s hands, which bears the inscription “Leo,” an allusion to indiscriminate arms production also found in Italian industry.

"An adventure, the one with Petrucci, which began several years ago now, and which has led us mutually to constantly grow and improve. Starting from a foundation of hard work and firm values, we have managed to achieve great goals, first and foremost The essence of lightness, the permanent mural at 3 World Trade Center in New York, measuring 15x3.5 m, created as part of the Masterpiece in the sky project promoted by tycoon Larry Silverstein. This was just the springboard for countless other successes, including the exhibition Over the Sky at the U.S. Embassy in Rome and Pompeii and the Mysteries of Eternal Beauty, a solo show at theinside the House of the Cryptoporticus, Archaeological Park of Pompeii and again the various site- specific installations such as the spectacular sculpture entitled Trame that became part of the permanent collection of Thetis Spa and again Margine, positioned in the setting of Torre Fossa lo Papa," says Giovanni Boccia, CEO Contemply Art & Investment.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 144-page catalog with 100 color images, published by Silvana Editoriale, with texts by Luca Beatrice, Giovanni Boccia, Chiara Canali, and Luigi Giordano.

Nello Petrucci (1981-) is an Italian artist and film-maker, living and working between Pompeii and New York. He studied cinematography in Rome at N.U.C.T; graduated from theAcademy of Fine Arts inNaples in Scenography. He has worked with directors such as: Martin Scorsese, Ari Taub, Manetti Bros, Antonio Capuano. Petrucci’s works are strongly influenced by cinema, particularly movie posters that are revisited by the artist as legacies of historical memory in which past and present coexist.

For all information, you can call +39 041 309 6605, send an email to cultura@fondazioneveneziaservizi.it or visit www.museivenezia.it.

Pictured: Nello Petrucci, Red Fish, Venice

Venice, Nello Petrucci's Profiles on display at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo

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