Pietro Finelli - Oeil

Dear Pietro

Dear Pietro, every time I come to your studio, I find your research in painting progressed, or rather, as you would say, deepened by a little. This time I was impressed by how the human figures that appear in the paintings looks isolated from the context. Whether they are sitting in a living room filled with objects, or admiring a landscape, your subjects appear as silent ghosts, presences that not everyone can see. Do you think this last year of pandemic, of forced social isolation, has influenced this aspect of your figuration? 

The influence of the life in which we are immersed certainly had an impact on art as well and the way of expressing ourselves. However, we must be careful to identify the social status tout-court with that of the works of the artist who lives in that place. As you say, of course, the pandemic affected me as well as everyone else. At a certain point, I worked on smaller works on paper, on short 6-second videos, which in some ways were affected by that situation, which in March and April last year, it was particularly acute in terms of apprehension and malaise. I also created a specific work as a testimony of those days. However, the paintings you have seen, even if designed and created during the pandemic, have their own internal path, which refer to my history, my path, my choices.

-Elisabetta Castellari, Pietro Finelli