ultrareale

“Ultrareale” lays out five different ways of returning the visible through painting, showing that in general when we speak of hyperrealism, very often we go no further than the surface. The truth is that when true painting enters a contest with photography, the result is the possibility of tapping into a beyond, which the eye – even that of a camera – could never see. 

ROBERTO BERNARDI‘s lollies and sweets show it, toned in a palette of bright and captivating colours, wrapped in layers of dazzling, gleaming cellophane. They attract us like magnets to then throw us into an impossible world, a land of extraordinarily seductive toys that in its splendid frivolity lays bare the superficiality of today. OTTORINO DE LUCCHI‘s fruits illustrate it, caught with an intriguing technique – that of watercolour drybrush – which makes the surfaces velvety. Realistic down to the tiny pit left by an insect on the apple peel. Yet impossible, lost in those boundless backgrounds, poised in a metaphysical universe which also makes it credible that a bowl can hover over what appears to be the horizon of the world. And then VALENTINA CECI says it with her compulsive mapping of refineries and industrial plants, rendered in ballpoint pen, tube after tube, container after container. And then, however, thrown into a soft Tiepolo sky, that seems able to swallow them, cancelling and denying all of man’s ingenuity. And then CASAGRANDE & RECALCATI with their sensual flowers gaping, resplendent, the scent of which can seemingly be perceived. Flowers which then at a second glance reveal crumbled petals, about to wilt. And then the meadows scattered with extraneous objects, treacherous animals and disturbing presences which turn our reading of reality upside down. And finally NICOLA NANNINI evokes it, for once throwing open the doors of the houses with which he has enchanted us and revealing their most secret rooms. His rooms with their unmade beds – an exquisite play of drapery on the snow white sheets – silently tell of love and farewells, habits and certainties, boredom and passion, in brush tip. So true, here and now, yet steeped in memories and nostalgia.