New Icon

21 Mar. 2009 | Palazzo Ducale – Sale del Castellare – Urbino (PU)
by Bruno Bandini
Artist profile by Ilaria Siboni
Catalog by Damiani Editions
Event under the patronage of the Province and City of Urbino

New Icon is a contemporary art exhibition which will take place in March 2009 at Palazzo Ducale in Urbino.

The aim of the exhibition is that of exploring a certain modality of contemporary pictorial practice which insists on the concept of “figurativity” of image. It is a “figuration” which does not exercise the fascination of the postponement, allusive or evocative, to nature. A figurativity which therefore has no correlation with a naïve concept of realism. New Icon seems also to exclude the recovery of the Informal Poetic: Its deep emotional charge, the ontological participation in the creation of the image’s space , the cult of gesture and that of sign-matter are not perceptible. New Icon also drifts away from the historical figurative experience that generated, in the past three decades, the “transavanguardia” phenomenon. New Icon is a hypothesis, an ulterior operative practice which seems to recuperate images which come from an updated revisiting of mass cultures and also from new technology, new expressive technology and languages not immune to performing art body reflection . Nevertheless and here is the fundamental characteristic, it is always painting.
The result of the artists thought which this exhibit intends to visualize is the painting exercise, the chromatic space translated by the use of of a means which is only apparently archaic. We may say: observing painting in the iconic fluidity of it’s variations. We are seeing artists who in any case paint: who in any case generate figurative images; whose figurativity is characterized by a strong conceptual implant.
On the occasion of the exhibit, a volume published by Damiani will be presented. The volume contains images of the exhibits artwork commented by Bruno Bandini, and resumes of the artists written by Ilaria Siboni.
“The archetypal images of Francesco Petrosillo send us to a dimension where humane and non humane face each other. They investigate a primordial space of bright tones where nature seems not to have yet had the possibility of knowing degrees of separation and of generating organic differences on which insists the process which we know as culture. Animals, shields and lances , violent chromaticisms , signs and scratches chase each other and generate totemic icons, all engaged in a symbolic conflict with unexpected results; a conflict which acts on the roots, deep, in eliminable, radical, that manifest themselves in the fragility of a dream.

Bruno Bandini