Pietro Finelli – Welcome to Europe

Welcome to Europe
Works on paper

Text by Tiziana Conti
10 through 31 December 2009

Opening Reception on Thursday, December 10, 6 -9 pm

The protagonist of Peter Handke’s Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter suffers from the ‘intrusiveness’ of things. He does not find any correspondence between the word and the actual object, only fracture, shifted meanings and no clarification. The inability to pick up signals from language is a problem of contemporary society, resulting that it becomes very difficult to overcome the limitations of not belonging, the fragmentation of the ego, the “great misunderstanding”.
In this complex area of the language re-definition, the search of a denied identity, we find Pietro Finelli’s research, which he expresses through painting and complementary drawing. Painting and writing interact in the context of an art whose aim is “digging to unearth,” primarily the latent energy, which is the substratum of reality, and which tries to retrieve a gravitational force able to reconnect the scattered fragments of existence.
Technological advances, authoritarianism and conformism of communication are watchwords in the contemporary society: it appears necessary, therefore, to penetrate into the sense obliquities, to de-code in order to re-establish the foundations. The process generates a steady accumulation of experience, a deeper knowledge. In this sense the action of trampling (to use the title of one of Finelli’s recent exhibitions) takes on a formative meaning. Finelli connects art and literature with a fondness for Joyce: the free flow of language, which pursues every sound of the word, to the most widespread resonance, enables us to grasp the slidings, which open a perspective on the universe.
Inevitably, the painting meets both mental and physical space. Finelli “works” the space, pervades it with the fibers of the language and catalyzes forms and flows which have to be filled with meaning. In this project, drawing plays a fundamental part: paper becomes more than a material element, it is a cast in which the signs are impressed as a manifestation of intuition, as a timeless seal. Signs and words cast an intimate and penetrating glance on existence, on tensions and contrasts, light and darkness, lighting sudden flashes. Reality is configured as a rhizome, which cannot be simplified, and that should be grasped in its endless and relentless proliferation. Painting then becomes a way of being which reveals the development of the individual history modelled on the ideal eternal history.

Pietro Finelli, (1957) Artist and curator, lives and works in Milan.
He has exhibited his work in galleries, museums and institutions around the world, including, Gallery MC New York, Il Ponte Contemporanea Roma, Galleria Pack Milan, Castel Nuovo, Naples Museum, Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Mamco) Geneva, Fundation FJKlemm Buenos Aires, Galerie Jacques Cerami Charleroi, VELAN Center for Contemporary Art in Turin.