Luca Pignatelli. Abstract

Luca Pignatelli's first solo exhibition in Switzerland is the result of a dialogue between the artist and curator Francesco Paolo Campione. The starting point for the exchange is the 'Genesis and Abstract' series, which the Milanese master has created over the past ten years. The large works are made from wide portions of railway tarpaulins, which are spliced, stitched, perforated and burnt, then painted and worked on with inserts of various kinds. In this series, the material is reduced to a minimum in order to restore, in the expressive manner of abstraction, the flavour of a universe full of meanings that the creative experience naturally brings together.

There are forty-nine works on show in Lugano, most of them presented to the public for the first time. The layout at Villa Malpensata not only provides the appropriate space for the works, but also transfers real corners of the artist's Milanese studio to some of the rooms. This is perhaps the easiest way to highlight the anthropological dimension and social context that are part of the primary conditions of all creativity, even the most abstract.

Biography

Luca Pignatelli was born in 1962 in Milan, the city where he still lives and works. He studied Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic. At that time, his courses in architectural composition were marked by the insights of Aldo Rossi and the idea of the sedimentary growth of history, which became central to his artistic research. From his beginnings, Pignatelli developed a pictorial research interacting with time, memory and space. From drawings on paper and masonite, first exhibited in 1987 at the Galleria Antonia Jannone in Milan, his production evolved through the use of multiple materials, techniques and large-format works. At the origin of Pignatelli's works is an incessant process of research, appropriation and reuse of objects, images, forms, codes and iconographies, from ancient civilisations to industrial progress. The resultis a heterogeneous collective and universal archive of ancient and contemporary eras that the artist brings together through analogies, contrasts and contaminations, according to his own vision of fluid and circular time.

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