"White Milan”?, as in the case of the city covered by a snowfall?; “Milan in white”?, like a garland that covers the city in a single colour, a photograph in which white thickens the atmosphere or an ironic postcard that turns “Milan by night” upside down?
Neither one nor the other, the latest series of paintings by Luca Pancrazzi exhibited at the Tega Gallery on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in these spaces is called "Bianco Milano". The city of Milan, no longer the center of attention as in the first two cases, designates a chromatic gradation, in the same way that there is an ivory white, a zinc white, a smokey white, a milky white and so on.
Now, what will a white Milano look like? a white that Milan would contribute to making unique? Certainly not to the silver one shown in the city's coat of arms and which has been the background of the red cross since the days of the Duchy's banner.
It is while driving around the city of Milan that Luca Pancrazzi has the habit of photographing streets and urban infrastructures without stopping or thinking twice. The photos accumulate over time, taken and forgotten, forgotten as soon as they are taken, to the point that he himself cannot say where exactly they were taken.
This is the starting point of White Milan, where the painter's gesture is not eliminated: long hours of painstaking work, of passages after passages of white, make up each single painting. What is put forward is not the city of Milan but the very act of painting. In White Milan Luca Pancrazzi, instead of limiting himself to making a picture, paints the painting in this way; he resets the subject and makes the city of Milan a white Milan. A gesture in line with a dialogue with and on painting that the artist undertook many years ago and has conducted up to now with great coherence.
using eleven shades of white, White Milan offers perception a range of nuances that are difficult to identify. Water, cloud, snow, marble, light: these and others are the elements that manifest themselves in a single colour. Elements with the opposite consistency, from liquid to solid via gaseous and other intermediate states, such as frost or air before a storm. For this reason, in those eleven or more shades of white, there are not only pictorial issues at stake but the very fabric of reality.
The result of that search is a quasi-monochrome – a monochrome cum figuris, that is, a painting that has not untied the last ties with the figuration; a painting that does not resolve itself in the geometric or chromatic composition of a surface, as in the historical manifestations of monochrome painting, but which takes up a certain aesthetic of the latter.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog containing the reproduction of all the exhibited works.
Galleria Tega (Milan) Monday to Saturday – 10:00 – 13:00 | 15:00 – 19:00 – Via Senato, 20.
