From September 11 to October 14, 2018, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni hosts the exhibition Sergio Ceccotti: The novel of painting 1958-2018, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.
About 40 works of art, set up in the Spazio fontana following a chronological order, trace the personal "novel of painting" passing through sixty years of activity - from 1958 to 2018 - of Sergio Ceccotti, forerunner of contemporary Italian figuration, heir of De Chirico's metaphysics and magical realism.
From the first paintings of the end of the Fifties with neo-cubist suggestions (Il giradischi, 1958; Ricordo d'Olanda, 1959) to those of the first half of the Sixties in which the powerful German expressionism echoes (Al bar II, 1962), the show continues with the intense works of the following decades (Avventura & mistero, 1966; Un delitto, 1967; Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, 1980; Sonata, 1998) immersed in that which can be called Ceccottian realism, a cultured, refined and original pictorial vision that distills inspirations from the history of art, which employs rhetorical artifices of the cinema in the Hitchcock style, of the comics (like "Diabolik" by the Giussani sisters), of photography, of photo-romance and of literature of genre, of the detective stories in the Hammett or Chandler style to the narrative of contemporary authors like Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, Antonio Tabucchi or Paul Auster. In Ceccotti's painting, ideas of the rebuses or rather of the drawings by the illustrator of the Settimana Enigmistica, Maria Ghezzi, are renewed.
Ceccotti, as Peter Greenaway's artist in "The Draughtsman's Contracts" or as the photographer of "Blow-up" by Michelangelo Antonioni, reveals the subtle wickedness hidden in his, apparently tranquil, views of the city, in his urban landscapes (Notturno, rio dei Mendicanti, 1990; Hiver à Montmartre, 1991; Estate a piazzale Flaminio, 2016), and perhaps other disturbing truths could come to light if we were able to find the code that governed his almost mocking painted rebuses.
This iconographic repertory represents the "backer" of some "horrifying" details of Ceccotti's representation, in which disturbing enigmas are hidden beyond doors and windows, stairways and halls of aseptic middle-class flats (Un après-midi parisien, 2017) or of modest hotel rooms (La robe verte, 2008). Spaces almost always anonymous but at the same time highly symbolic, because of the presence of sometimes alarming clues, seem to precede or to follow a moment of drama that, thanks to a skilful direction, is precluded from the glance of the spectator who can only imagine it.
