The Vistamare Cultural Association is pleased to present the first one-man show by Pietro Roccasalva (born in Modica, Sicily in 1970, he lives and works in Milan).

Pietro Roccasalva’s work involves painting as its specific field of action, particularly when it envisages use of installation, videos, and digital reproduction:  all those media that apparently participate in the “crisis” of painting itself.  His works – like those previously exhibited at the Fondazione Ratti in Como, the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome, and the Archivio di Stato in Turin – are highly variable structures where elaborations on the computer, sculptural, environmental, and painted elements together illustrate the preceding process and follow the execution of a pictorial image.  Painting as a system of installation and mise en scene is confronted here with its existential possibilities and conditions in our current perceptive landscape, dominated by electronic media, permanent spectacle, and total cinematic experience.
The process that leads to elaboration and realization of an image – a process that is always carried out in solitude – is analyzed and rendered visible with anatomical precision.  It leads to total visibility, the absence of “mystery” that is the same form of absolute vision-observation-surveillance that uses photography, television, and moving images every day.
Pietro Roccasalva’s work revolves around these reciprocal poles of amplification and disappearance of the image through its reproduction, around the theme of its death due to excess presence once it accepts immersion in the contemporary landscape of the media and serial images.
Even here in this, his first one-man show, the reality of painting – which is in itself the fruit of a previous scenic and iconic work – is placed within a set that could in turn become the point of departure for creation of another painted image.  Fisheye – this is the title of the entire project – converts the mechanism of projection and reconstruction into a theme, together with the painting as a “scene” and space for reduction through mimesis:  the vision of the painting as a concrete object is in some way obstructed by the presence of an imposing pyramidal construction that displays the homothetic projection of the perimeter of the room.  In the adjoining room, the cross section of a metal bucket inserted in the wall and whose base reproduces the same pattern as the floor refers to the idea of imitation, transfer, and interpenetration of different levels of reality.
The entire system thus establishes a repertoire of conventions that preside over construction of an image – simulation, projection, iconographic syntax – as if it wished to perform an autopsy of painting through the creation and acceptance of a new, artificial, and serial body. (Alessandro Rabottini)