For his first solo show at Vistamare gallery space in Pescara, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio, whose practice has been defined since the beginning by an osmotic attitude, articulated between different forms of expression – from installation to drawing, from video animation to performance – focuses on painting, which has always played a central role in his production.
In the six rooms of the gallery, he displays forty new works made between 2023 and 2024, seemingly transferring into painting a line by poet Sandro Penna: ‘one flower calls the other’.
These floral paintings go beyond the intention of exploring the forms of such a recurring theme in the history of art. While being affected by a certain attraction toward Italian painting of the early twentieth century as well as to the chromatic atmospheres typical of Edward Hopper’s painting, Scotto di Luzio reinvents and transforms the compositional values sometimes through bright colors, sometimes through faint shades or through a sharp black and white, in a continuous game of mirrors between cultured painting and naïve painting.
In its captivating simplicity, the exhibition could be confusing and almost disturbing, because of the artist’s apparent ease in presenting a disengaged and demythologized painting.
While in the past Scotto di Luzio had often used his own image in his work, within the broader context of a reflection on contemporary society, for this exhibition he turns to natural images, as if attempting to escape the identity narrative, in a time focused on identity, the body and their perception.
And yet in some of the exhibited works, next to the flowers, the ghostly presence of humans is captured, evoked by objects extracted from everyday life – a lonely cigarette left on the ashtray, a notepad reminding an appointment, a newspaper left on the tram – as excerpts from a personal novel.
Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio was born in Pozzuoli (Naples) in 1972. Among his solo exhibitions: “Una mostra straordinaria”, Vistamare, Milan, (2022); “In bocca a te ogni cosa muore”, Kunst Meran, Merano (2017); “Pane al Pane”, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2015); “Persona in meno”, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2010); “Untitled”, Ancient & Modern Gallery, London (2008); “Tableaux Vivant”, Museo Madre, Naples (2007). He lives and works in Berlin.