Marco Petrus: Belle Città

MarcoPetrus

BELLE CITTÀ

Marco Petrus BELLE CITTÀ

APRIL 26 - JUNE 9. 2013

Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com

cover: Monza, 2011, oil on canvas, 62 1/4” x 96 1/2”

Opposite: PSM 3, 2010, oil on canvas, 19 3/4” x 23 3/4”

Marco Petrus

feeling of place. In contemplation of images of place there is a pause in the flow of time; they freeze forevermore the visual expression of what was, along time’s continuum, once thought important.

Though the mystery is never solved, the struggle to make sense from the bits and pieces of existence – “like the lines of a hand” – continues. Celebrated contemporary Italian artist Marco Petrus paints images of highly geometric and decontexualized architectural forms of the modern urban landscape, presented with a purity of radiant color, unconventional perspective and reductive essentiality. Though his images relate to the particular incarnation of place that has evolved to be the “city,” their power to engender wonder and fascination is as potent as that of the ancient cave paintings. His unique practice of presenting luminous images of building, factory and other facades that are strikingly devoid of human or other life engenders a riveting sense of unexpected stillness bereft of the usual commotion of the city.

They function to extract the extroversion from the personality of the city leaving its soul for introspection. Stripped by the paintings of its external bravado, can the city then be reconceived as a place purposed toward some enduring ideal – the vocation of cultural excellence – rather than just the temporality of competitive achievement?

These engaging paintings of European, Asian and American urban buildings valorize but also cloak in mystery. Like the primal cave paintings, they too freeze time and captivate attention. A Petrus painting intimates but does not fully reveal. It resonates that its subject is germane to man’s history– perhaps even an icon that defines part of his modern culture – but it does not, in its image alone, explain more than did the petroglyphs. What is clear in both instances, however, is the enduring imprint of importance, a visual signal outside the flow of time that there is something here worth pondering, wondering about, remembering. Indeed, the sense of the immutable in Petrus’ paintings recalls the words of the 19th century poet Gautier: “le buste/Survit à la cité”– art outlives the city.

Petrus’ bold projection of his art to meet the post-modern city and the resulting synthesis – blending its architecture with his innovative techniques of composition, reduction, perspective, lighting, color and paint application – is beyond verisimilitude and elevates the built image to a realm of new psychological significance and won him inclusion in the 54th Venice Biennale as well as numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and Asia over the last 22 years.

Born in 1960 in the Italian coastal city of Rimini, Petrus grew up from the age of five in the gritty neighborhoods of the Garibaldi section of Milan where his father, an artist of Ukrainian descent displaced to Italy by World War II, made paintings in the run-down buildings that had been repurposed as studio spaces and galleries. The Milanese art scene of the ’70s and ’80s centered on Bar Giamaica, the city’s version of New York’s Cedar Tavern, where the bohemian art world converged

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)

Throughout history, the mystery of man’s relationship with his physical world has been a source of constant fascination and creative exploration. Since pre-historic time, the search for understanding of the connection between self and place has engrossed the human imagination. It has often taken the form of making images – both of the physical and the metaphysical, the observed and the imagined. Images help sort out the mysterious and mark ideas and symbols about what seems meaningful in the midst of surrounding chaos. They are imprints of the search for significance and the effort to be at home – in the community of others and in the world at large.

Artists today paint on canvas their own impressions of this struggle just as their forebears made marks on cave walls or stone surfaces. In each instance, the images are preserved timelessly, as visual signifiers carrying meanings and connecting across time and place. Paintings, like the petroglyphs, are the markings of the immutable, expressing notions of cultural value that act as clues in the greater existential puzzle. In the contemplation of their mystery there lies the opportunity to bridge gaps between individual selves and the world outside, between an uncertain present and the enduring past, between a sense of isolation and the

New Yorker, 2012, oil on canvas, 313/4” x 391/2”

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optimally a place of commerce and exchange or were the Greeks prescient in banning economic activity in favor of oracular activity, athletic games and healthful life? Is the role of a city ideally to be a religious center like Rome, Mecca or Jerusalem? Or should it be about recreation or, as travel writer Mary McCarthy once observed about Venice, “a sort of amusement park”?

Petrus’ paintings open thought about the urban ideal to myriad possibilities. It is as though the buildings appear to have levitated from the skyline and hover in the pictures with a silent glow. Their connection

to the ground becomes superfluous in Petrus’ imaginative engagement between mind and building and so no longer is even shown. With the severing of this physical connection the paintings similarly liberate the idea of the city from historical assumptions. The structures are spotlighted like virtuosic soloists alone on a stage excised of elements deemed by the artist as unnecessary – people, trees, vehicles, even entryways are absent. The focus is on the form, its volume and weight, its diagonal relationship to the picture plane, the contrast of geometry to flat color fields of sky, the light and hues, all of which serve to concentrate the visual experience in which the improbable settles into the natural – an imaginative reconsideration of the way we think about the city. The flattening and abstraction of color and geometry creates a profound stillness in which the viewer is able to ruminate more fully. The result is more architectonic apparition than mere description.

In offering us his unique visual articulation of the primary architectural forms of contemporary cities, Petrus confers a remarkable opportunity for imagination and reflection, both about the urban experience in particular and the making of culture in general. These images of an urban reality, subtly altered from that ordinarily resident in most observers’ experience, jostle perception and lure the viewer into looking more closely and thinking more actively. They both cleanse and modify common conceptions of the past while simultaneously opening to new ideas about the future. In this regard, Petrus’ paintings function in a way similar to Jorge Luis Borges’ conception of post-modern literature and the effect of existentialist and magical realist writing to blur fiction and fact to provoke new ways of thinking.

Petrus’ artistic techniques to accomplish this result are numerous.

He depicts the forms of urban edifice with a reverence reminiscent of his portraitist forebears during the Italian Renaissance, painters such as Bronzino, Lippi, or Giorgione, each of whom filled a canvas with the image of his subject, usually devoid of other elements to eliminate distraction. Their use of intriguing color and perspective concentrated attention and inspired respect. In an equally masterful way, Petrus employs similar techniques to intensify the power of his image and to focus contemplation. In these remarkable paintings – nearly portraits themselves – of revered buildings whose architecture has a nobility not unlike that of the Renaissance portraitists’ subjects, Petrus eliminates everything but the building. Conspicuous is the absence of any

and in the midst of which the young Petrus was initiated into the artistic vanguard of the time.

After his father’s death in 1984, the community of Milanese artists helped Petrus – who was then in his early twenties – to open a printing shop and gave him a press. Though it never earned much, the shop quickly became a meeting place for other artists who encouraged Petrus to pursue his interests in architecture and painting. Soon this “architectpainter” was producing remarkable images of edifices articulated by a personal vision and signal techniques that include the use of clear geometries, enigmatic perspectives, pure colors, evanescent light, and the elimination of any reference to the human figure, urban activity or elements he deems unessential. These techniques enable Petrus to freeze his image, suspend it in time, and allow it to shimmer and float, attaining the role of leading character in a freeze-frame of urban meaning.

The resulting unexpected stillness inspires a sense of deep contemplation and enables a rethinking of accepted notions of the city.

Petrus never reveals the penumbra of his own ideas surrounding the specific metaphorical significance of his images. Yet their mystifications invite introspective musing about the ideal of the metropolis: Is it

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reference to the human creator of these edifices, to the architects who conceived them, to the people who occupy them, to anything remotely organic. Rarely is there a cloud in the monochromatic sky to offer even the scantest chance for distraction from the primary subject.

This process of intense focus operates as a subtle visual seduction, a siren’s call to look closely and wonder. Perhaps a part of the engaging genius of these paintings is what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “the mark of infinity” in his groundbreaking The Poetics of Space (1964), a lyrical exploration of how man’s perceptions of space share his thoughts, memories, and dreams. Part of the ineffable power of these paintings lies in the consequence of immensity subtly suggested in the remarkable way Petrus presents enormous forms that tower and captivate but do no intimidate. His unique allusion to this idea of immensity is communicated in many instances through taking up virtually the entire picture plane with the portrait of an edifice presented in dynamic and unexpected perspective. There resides in the scale of image relative to the size of canvas a sense of grandeur that evokes from the meditation of the work a gradually more intense feeling of infinity. That grandeur, presented in isolation without reference to the mortal beings who created the forms that overtake the canvas, only serves to concentrate a sort of daydream of matters beyond the immediate and greater than those of the human condition. It can be likened in this respect to what Bachelard called “an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”

Petrus has now lived and worked producing his visual daydreams for more than 45 years in Milan, Italy’s second-largest city and one

Mosca, 2008, oil on canvas, 313/4” x 353/4”

of the world’s leading industrial and financial centers. Milan has also been called “the most architectural city in Italy.” Its dizzying array of styles – Ancient, Gothic, Art Nouveau, Neoclassical, Art Deco, Rationalist, Modernist, Novecento – fascinated Petrus from a young age and ignited his abiding interest in the forms and structures of the built environment. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, one of the world’s leading institutions for higher education in architecture, engineering and industrial design. He became a wanderer of the city, photographing with only a small Kodak camera – from obscure angles in partial frame – the edifices that amazed him. His photos became his sketches. At a time of industrial preoccupation in the ’80s and ’90s, when most people had stopped bothering even to look at their city, Petrus became bound up with it, a flâneur whose obsession with architecture was that of an archeologist. Petrus’ adventuresome techniques are perhaps natural hereditaments too of Milan’s history as the cradle of Futurism and a place where the Italian avant-garde has long flourished and conceptual experimentation has been at the very core of the city.

Petrus had his first solo exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Noa in 1991 and a major show at Centro Arte San Fedele in Milan in 1993. He was honored with the Lombardy San Carlo Borromeo Prize that same year.

In 2003 he participated in the Italian Factory: La Nuova Scena Artistica Italiana (“Italian Factory: The New Italian Art Scene”) project held during the 50th Venice Biennale and later at the European Parliament Building in Strasbourg and the Palazzo della Promotrice delle Belle Arti (Centre for the Promotion of the Fine Arts) in Turin, Italy. In 2005 his work was included in Milan Upside Down Project, a group exhibition in New York, and in 2007 he participated in the Italiana group exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China, and The New Italian Art Scene exhibition at Taipei F.A. Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. His paintings have appeared during the ensuing years in numerous international solo and group shows in such venues as London, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid, Prague, Geneva, and Melbourne among others. In 2011 Petrus’ work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale.

A Petrus painting is itself the visual expression of what the great Italian writer Italo Calvino likely meant when he said about the city, that it “does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand….” With a similar sense of mystery, Petrus does not “tell” about the city but rather exposes its semiotic meaning – its “mark of infinity” – through painting elements that define its forms and transcribe its cultural DNA. The work, like Calvino’s notion, intimates but does not indoctrinate. In these radiant pictures there are “scratches, indentations and scrolls” of one of man’s most important creations – the buildings of cities. Petrus reveals the “lines of the hand” of this architecture but leaves the viewer to the palmistry of interpretation.

– Kenneth R. Marvel

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Upside Down, 2012, oil on canvas, 31.5” x 23.75”

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Roma, 2012, oil on canvas, 19.75” x 23.75”

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Casa del Vento, 2011, oil on canvas, 15.75” x 19.75”

Quelli che stanno 1, 2011, oil on canvas, 15.75” x 19.75”

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NY, 2011, oil on canvas, 15.75” x 19.75”

Ca’brutta, 2012, oil on canvas, 19.75” x 15.75”

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Napoli 2, 2011, oil on canvas, 47.5” x 31.75”

Garbatella, 2009, oil on canvas, 47.5” x 63.25”

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Madison Square Garden, 2010, oil on canvas, 47.5” x 63.25”

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Sequenze (edition of 50), 2011, tapestry, 73.5” x 56”

Florin Court (London), 2010, oil on canvas, 31.75” x 39.5”

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Shanghai, 2011, oil on canvas, 31.75” x 39.5”

Corso Sempione, 2011, oil on canvas, 31.75” x 35.75”

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NY, 2009, oil on canvas, 35.75” x 31.75”

Helsinki, 2011, oil on canvas, 31.5” x 27.75”

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Casa Radici Di Stefano, 2010, oil on canvas, 31.75” x 23.75”

Trieste, 2008, oil on canvas, 31.75” x 35.75”

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Monza, 2011, oil on canvas, 19.75” x 23.75”

Smeraldo, 2011, oil on canvas, 31.75” x 47.5”

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Monza, 2011, oil on canvas, 23.75” x 19.75”

Marco Petrus

Born: 1960, Rimini, Italy Lives and works in Milan, Italy Education: Polytechnic University of Milan 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996

1995 1993 1991

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2011 Italia Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale in Venice, Italy.

2010 Triennale Design Museum of Milan, Italy 2007 Review of Italian Art, Royal Palace in Milan, Italy 2004 XIV Quadriennal of Rome, in Turin, Italy 1995 International Review of Pully Museum in Switzerland and

AEG Kunstlerforderung in Berlin, Germany 1993 Region of Lombardy’s San Carlo Borromeo Prize

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2013 Bella Città, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2012 Dalle Belle Città, First Gallery, Rome, Italy Le Città della pittura, Serrone della Villa Reale, Monza, Italy 2011 Synchronicity, Frigorifri Milanesi, Milan, Italy 2009 Marco Petrus Trieste al Centro, ex Pescheria, Trieste, Italy 2008 Petrus’ Milano, Centralnyj Dom Arkitektora, Moscow 2007 Ceci n’est pas une exposition, Nuovo Spazio Paradiso, Giardini

Biennale, Venice, Italy Architettonica, ex Chiesa di San Francesco, Como, Italy 2005 Milano Upsidedown, Milano at Columbus Day, Istituto Italiano di Cultura 2004 Milano Milano, Fondazione Piero Portaluppi, Milan, Italy 2003 Udine, Palazzo Frisacco, Tolmezzo, Udine, Italy London Suspended, Barbara Behan Contemporary Art, London, UK Upside Down, Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, Italy 2002 Marco Petrus, Nuova Artesegno, Udine 2001 Marco Petrus, Frullini Arte Contemporanea, Pistoia Omaggio a Moretti, Fondazione dell’Ordine degli Architetti, Milan, Italy

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Verdeocra, Galleria Les Chances de l’Art, Bolzano, Italy Petrus 1999, Galleria Antologia, Monza, Italy Il Mistero delle Città, Il Polittico, Rome, Italy Lo Spazio del Tempo, Galleria Mari, Imbersago, Lecco Storie di Città,Galleria San Pantalon, Venice, Italy Quadri da viaggio, Castello di Belgioioso, Belgioioso, Italy Marco Petrus, Galleria Monopoli, Pavia, Italy Marco Petrus, Galleria Il Cenacolo, Piacenza Marco Petrus, Centro Arte San Fedele, Milan, Italy Marco Petrus, Spazio Noa, Milan, Italy

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2012 Misiad, Milano si Autoproduce Design, Cattedrale della Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy

Dies Irae, Le Gallerie dei Gerosolimitani, Perugia, Italy 2011 54.Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte. La Biennale di

Venezia, Padiglione Italia, Venice, Italy

Quelli che restano, Stati d’animo del paesaggio urbano,

Spazzio Oberdan, Milan, Italy 2010 Quali Cose Siamo, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, Italy 2009 Contemplazioni. Bellezza e tradizione del Nuovo nella

pittura italiana contemporanea, Castel Sismondo e

Palazzo del Podestà, Rimini, Italy NoLandscape – la sparizione del paesaggio, Fondazione

Bandera per l’Arte, Busto Arsizio, Varese, Italy 2008 Rumors, ex Arsenale Borgo Dora, Torino, Italy 2007 Nuovi pittori della realtà, PAC Padiglione d’Arte

Contemporanea, Milan, Italy

La Nuova Figurazione Italiana.To be continued…,

Fabbrica Borroni, Bollate, Milan, Italy Il treno dell’Arte–Da Tiziano a Nespolo alla Street Art: 500

anni di Arte Italiana 58° Premio Michetti, Museo Michetti, Francavilla al Mare,

Chieti, Italy Arte Italiana, 1968-2007, Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy Linee all’orizzonte. Paesaggi tra descrizione e astrazione, GAM, Genova, Italy The New Italian Art Scene, TFAM Taipei Fine Arts

Museum, Taipei, China

Italiana, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China 2006 XXXIII Premio Sulmona, Sulmona, L’Aquila, Italy 2005 Generazione Anni ’60, Civico Museo Parisi Valle,

Maccagno, Italy

Miracolo a Milano, Palazzo della Ragione, Milan, Italy Città di Carta, Pittura Italiana Arte Contemporanea,

Milan, Italy E42 EUR Segno e sogno del ’900, Eur – Salone delle Fontane, Rome, Italy 2004 XIV Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma, Rome, Italy Anteprima, Palazzo della Promotrice delle Belle Arti,

2003

2002

2001 2000 1999

1998

1997

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Torino, Italy Italian Factory, ARCO 04, Madrid, Spain Italian Factory. La nuova scena artistica italiana, Parlamento Europeo, Strasbourg, France Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Extra50, 50. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, Venice, Italy Palazzo della Promotrice delle Belle Arti, Torino, Italy Il Cuore, Barbara Behan Contemporary Art, London Europe Art Languages, Techo A. S., The Factory Project, Praha; Centro Cultural Moncloa, Madrid, Spain Talk Show_dialoghi in mostra, Viafarini, Milan, Italy Premio Cairo Communication, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan, Italy 3° Premio Donato Frisia, Merate, Lecco, Italy Misure uniche per una collezione, Palazzo Tiranni – Castracani, Cagli (Pesaro Urbino) 53° Premio Michetti, Museo Michetti, Francavilla al Mare Premio Cairo Communication, La Posteria, Milan, Italy Landscapes, Torre Medioevale, Moggio Udinese, Italy Premio Sabaudia F. Ferrazzi, Sabaudia, Latina, Italy Sui Generis, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea

Figurazione a Milano 1950-2000, La Posteria, Milan, Italy Premio Donato Frisia, Merate, Lecco, Italy Le carte dell’Officina milanese, Appiani Arte, Milan, Italy Sulla Pittura, Artisti italiani sotto i 40 anni, Palazzo Sarcinelli, Conegliano, Treviso, Italy Passeggiata Italiana, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, Sunshine Coast University, Australia La Pittura Ritrovata, Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, Italy Cronache Vere, Spazio Consolo, Milan, Italy Venature, La Posteria, Milan, Italy VI Biennale dell’Incisione, Gaiarine, Treviso, Italy Opera genera Opera, Università degli Studi, Bologna, Italy Passeggiata Italiana, Customs House Gallery, Brisbane Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns; Co.As.It. Head Office – Faraday, Melbourne, Australia XXXI Premio Vasto – Effetto Città, Vasto, Chieti, Italy Premio Donato Frisia, Merate, Lecco, Italy Neovedutismo, Galleria Marieschi, Monza, Italy Premio Casoli, Serra San Quirico, Ancona, Italy La Città antica e contemporanea, Università La Sapienza – Museo Laboratorio d’ Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy Esterno Città, Appiani Arte Trentadue, Milan, Italy II Permio Morlotti, (awarded,) Imbersago, Lecco, Italy XXXVII Premio Suzzara (awarded,) Suzzara, Italy In Rilievo, Incisori Italiani e Tedeschi, Ospedale Soave, Codogno, Italy Metropoli, Artisti delle aree metropolitane di Milano e Berlino, Assago, Milan, Italy XVII Rassegna Nazionale del Disegno (awarded), Nova

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

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Milanese, Milan, Italy Interpretations Urbaines, Musee de Pully, Lausanne, Switzerland Xilon Italia, Museo di Villa Corce, Genova, Italy Venature, AEG Kunstlerforderung, Berlin, Germany Sentimento della Città, Fondazione Corrente, Milan, Italy II Tempio Abitato, Palazzo Centofirme, Lissone, Italy Centro artisti per la Città, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan Reale e Immaginario, Santa Maria della Pietà, Cremona, Italy VII Triennale dell’Incisione, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan, Italy I colori della poesia – omaggio a Neruda, Società Umanitaria, Milan, Italy XX Premio Sulmona (awarded), Sulmona, L’Aquila, Italy Permio Internazionale per l’Incisione, Palazzo Ferrero della Marmora, Biella, Italy Venature, Palazzo Lanfranchi, Pisa, Italy Utopie Metropolitane, Facoltà di Architettura, Milan, Italy Linoleum, Collegio Cairoli, Pavia, Italy Arte Giovane in Lombardia, Santa Maria della Pietà, Cremona, Italy Linoleum, Palazzo Sormani, Milan, Italy VI Biennale della xilografia contemporanea, Carpi, Italy Venature, Cascina Grande, Rozzano, Milan, Italy Abitare II Tempo, Verona, Italy

PSM 12, 2010, oil on canvas, 19.75” x 23.75”

Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 Downtown: 125 West Palace Avenue | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.8997 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com