Pietro Moretti

Garden or hospital bed? The image has dwelled in Pietro Moretti's mind for years and materializes here in an oil and watercolor work, with inks and pigments led to float by the imponderable rhythm of water. The composition is dense and concise. It pushes all the details to the edges in hallucinatory green-dominant chromatics. Their flow breaks our sense of time, reality and perception to trigger emotional states at the edges. The title is dark and disturbing, The Empire of Disease. As is always the case in his works, the cue is literary, but also deeply intertwined with real life. It all originates from Boris Vian's book The Foam of Days, featuring a protagonist consumed by a respiratory illness. And here is the cue from which to generate a painful and all existential vision. The theme of illness is dear to the artist, already in other paintings. The protagonist here is a medicalized Ophelia with water lilies blocking her lungs. Thus invaded by nature and its impassive cyclicity, she is alone watching over her illness. “She, so vulnerable, is nevertheless the only one who understands her pain. As much as one can empathize, the disease is only of those who live with it.” The woman is also enveloped in boxes of medicine under a hospital-like light, like a city of medicines. And then there are the plants, medical essences, which have to do with the respiratory system. They creep intrusively and unstoppably into his body as well. “On the one hand, the conformity of the boxes, on the other, the unfolding metamorphosis of nature.” In his challenge to the real, a sense of precariousness, all psychological, even feverish, always dominates.

Cristiana Campanini