Sergio Ceccotti: The novel of painting 1958-2018

From September 11 to October 14, 2018 the Palazzo delle Esposizioni hosts “Sergio Ceccotti: The novel of painting 1958-2018”, an exposition promoted by Roma Capitale Assessorato alla Crescita Culturale and curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.
About 40 works of art, set up in the Spazio fontana following a chronological order, thinking back over the personal “novel of painting” passing through sixty years of activity, from 1958 to 2018, of Sergio Ceccotti, fortunate forerunner of contemporary Italian figuration, farsighted heir of De Chirico’s metaphysics and magical realism.

From the first paintings of the end of the Fifties with neo-cubist suggestions (The record, 1958; Memory of Holland, 1959) to those of the first half of the Sixties in which the powerful German expressionism echoes (At the bar II, 1962), the show continues with the intense works of the following decades (Adventure & mystery, 1966; A crime, 1967; Fight between Tancredi and 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 the 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 paintings the starting points of the rebuses or better, of the designs by the illustrator of the Settimana Enigmistica Maria Ghezzi are renewed.
 
Ceccotti, as Peter Greenaway’s designer in The mysteries of the Compton House Gardens 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 (Nocturnal, rivulet of the Mendicants, 1990; Hiyer à Montmartre, 1991; Summer at Flaminio square, 2016), and perhaps other disturbing truths could come to light if we were able to find the code that governed his articulated and almost mocking rebuses painted.
 
This iconographic repertory represents the “mandate” of some “horrifying” details of Ceccotti’s representation, in which disturbing enigmas are hidden beyond the doors and the windows, the stairways and the halls of aseptic middle-class flats (Un après-midi parisien, 2017) or of modest hotel rooms (La robe verte, 2008). Spaces that are almost always anonymous, but at the same time highly symbolic that, because of the presence of sometimes alarming clues, seem to precede or to follow a moment of drama that, with knowing direction, is precluded from the glance of the spectator who can only imagine it.

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