Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tracce

The relationship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and art is well known. The connection between Art History and the work of the great writer and filmmaker is a very close embrace: from Rosso Fiorentino to Piero della Francesca, from Masaccio to Caravaggio, Pasolini weds painting with cinema and poetry in a single, intense union. His universe is powerfully iconographic and imaginative, and it comes as no surprise that contemporary artists invited to reinterpret him through their own languages have enthusiastically accepted the invitation, approaching it with passion and intelligence, each according to their own sensibility.

A central element in the contemporary works featured in this project is the body — an omnipresent motif in Pasolini’s films and literary works. A profoundly human, physical, and real body, which Pasolini loved to sublimate through painterly citation, elevating it above the banality of the everyday to preserve its sacredness.

Many of the invited artists have paid homage to this concept of the body: Emanuele Gregolin and Maurizio Pometti with their young men — the ragazzi di vita — shaped by the sensuality of a powerfully expressive color; Ugo Riva, Daniele Scarpa Kos, Ferdinando Bruni, Sergio Battarola, Maurizio L’Altrella, and Marco Rossi with their tragic figures, immersed in atmospheres charged with tangible, throbbing emotional tension. Giuseppe Siracusa also reflects on the body, staging a composition with a strong theatrical quality that intertwines life, love, and death, as does Paolo Caldarella, who suspends two nude figures in a dreamlike, timeless dimension, as if in a vision.

The body also resonates in Anna Santinello’s hand woven from metal threads — a hand transformed into a symbolic gesture, a dramatic presence — and in Alessandro Verdi’s furious, overwhelming strokes, marked by the vigor and wonderful instinctiveness that always characterize his work. The mark and painterly gesture, translated into abstract yet emotionally charged compositions, also define the works of Chen Jianping — the only foreign artist in the exhibition, from China — and Dolores Previtali, who on this occasion departs from her usual production, entrusting her reflection to the expressive power of color.

For Stefano Cipollari, the face portrayed is that of Pasolini himself, absorbed and contemplative, while Ferdinando Freres transforms a well-known image of the writer into a pop-inspired icon.

Lastly, body takes form in its own way in the ironic image of a bust in a suit and tie painted by Vinzela, surrounded by chess pawns — almost a reference to Pasolini’s complex relationship with the bourgeoisie and its rituals. The demon of consumerism, of conformity within a society that no longer values diversity, can also be felt in the work of Sebastian de Gobbis, in which an urban landscape fades into a barcode. A landscape — or rather, a landscape of the soul — also emerges in the tormented lines of Ivan Picenni’s work.

And finally, the third major theme, also of extraordinary importance in Pasolini’s research: his relationship with the Sacred. Though he declared himself an atheist, he was in constant search of the divine. This theme hovers more or less explicitly over several of the works in the project, but only one artist, Armando Fettolini, chose it as his central subject. The choice is no coincidence: Fettolini has always approached the Sacred through his art, restoring to it its ancestral and pure value, far removed from the contradictions imposed upon it by Catholicism.

Simona Bartolena