January 13 - March 3 2021

Hypothesis: Angela Madesani

The visitor is introduced by the video work Gymkhana (2012), origin of the first exhibition by Pierpaolo Curti at the Michela Rizzo Gallery in Venice. It is a walk in the mountains, on a high Dolomite route. There are two points of view in slow motion, that of the artist who films the path, the walkway, Path 21, through a steadicam, and that given by a camera that captures the artist himself, from below, his gaze towards the path that awaits him during the journey.

The opening image is also the closing one. Between the two is the path through the works that the viewer is called to do.

In the first room of the gallery is a large wall painting with a star constellation, Constellation # 21. It is the macrocosm, compared to our existence, microcosm.

On display are paintings of different moments and sizes: they are the sedimentation of the inner process generated by walking.

The language to which Curti devotes himself most is painting, but he uses different media for his works: from drawing to video, to installation. His is always an experimental attitude towards the medium, its peculiarities, its wide spectrum of possibilities.

A fundamental aspect of his research is, over the years, the desire to declare the autonomy of the work, its eloquence and its independence from words, which could, should offer an explanation. It is the tension towards the eloquence of research, of work. The awareness, the action, which involve an ethical value are fundamental. Any action calls for another. Everything has a consequence. So in Gymkhana.

The journey, the road, the means to the end, the point of arrival are much more important. The path is the protagonist of this exhibition, in which the individual works have a choral role in which man does not appear, but is the protagonist. We are faced with a job in which action and experience are fundamental.

The overall atmosphere of the works is always tinged with cold colors, in which the light is merciless and revealing. His painting is lean, compact, the backgrounds are wide and flat. The subjects are bridges without parapet, mountains without paths, wide impassable rungs, which could, however, be support levels, placed in the coast of the rock.

It is an existential work in which autobiography is only one of the possible starting points. In his paintings, as I have already written, there are many links with cinema and literature. Ties metabolized and own facts, without any citations whatsoever. Curti's is an attempt at zeroing: in content and form. He is a slow artist, producing only about fifteen works a year. He does not feel the need to inflate the landscape, already overloaded with images, with his presence.

After all, the only way to be able to see is to slow down the pace to be able to grasp, look carefully, become aware of the surrounding in its wonder and magnificence, like the great constellation. We must do it to enter phenomena, to feel the sound of silence, of nature, to be able to observe.

The viewer, through Curti's works, should, in fact, be led into a dimension different from the perceived reality, in an atmosphere of solitude, of absence, which we should - it could be a moral imperative - learn to accept, because it is part of our to be. A part that we tend to evade, convinced that we are stronger than we are, immune to isolation.

The man, the artist, walks alone at high altitude, with his thoughts that help him understand what is real, what is not superstructured. All the works on display are marked by the existential suggestions caused by walking, fear, courage, intuition, adrenaline, strength. The body, in its totality, passes from one dimension to another, together with thought.

All in a dimension that goes beyond any relativism, to reach the truth, his own, that of the surrounding, of man, of nature, of the poetry of the whole in which the circle closes every time.